My funny spam from my creigslist ad

[knight_toolworks]

I post my services on ceigs list with never a spam. but today I get this little sign maker sending me this for a cheap vinyl sign.

"Thirty dollar signs magnetic or decal 1x2 ft all 30 mil excellent quality film please email us to get your new signs today"

this was my reply
"don't be spamming a real sign maker with cheap vinyl signs. at least if your going to spam find a non sign maker to spam. now get lost fool."

now the really fun part below is the reply and as you see at the bottom was my reply that he missed. who wants a sign maker who can't read?

"HI steve got your email was an epty in box? can I help you in getting some signs

Pete

--- On Sat, 11/29/08, steve <steve@cncrouting.biz (mailto:steve@cncrouting.biz)> wrote:

From: steve <steve@cncrouting.biz (mailto:steve@cncrouting.biz)>
Subject: Re: thirty dollar signs for company vehicles thanks Pete
To: oregondoveinc@yahoo.com (mailto:oregondoveinc@yahoo.com)
Date: Saturday, November 29, 2008, 6:56 PM

O
>
>
> thirty dollar signs magnetic or decal 1x2 ft all 30 mil excellent quality film please email us to get your new signs today
>
>
>

don't be spamming a real sign maker with cheap vinyl signs. at least if your going to spam find a non sign maker to spam. now get lost fool.
"

[harryball]

This was an auto responder. While it's possible it is a legit spam (i.e. they are trying to sell you what they say) it's more likely you only verified your email address as valid so it can be added to a more valuable spam list and sold.

NEVER respond to any kind of spam, never open attachments, never do anything but delete them. There are too many bots that can download and install and spam lists you can get your email attached to.

Just my advice.

/RB

[magic]

so how do you get rid of the 130 or so spams a day? Mt filters cut out 98 percent but really.... who's interested in midgets selling knock off watches that will give you a college degree?

[gene]

Too bad they dont make an automatic return program to send the spams back to the origional sender

[harryball]

Just wait until someone uses your valid email as the spoofed origin of a spam. This is preferred and helps emails get through some spam filters. It's a pain. I battle this carp weekly. About 95% of the email that goes through our filter is spam, only 5% is delivered as valid messages and of that there will always be a few spam messages that slip through.

/RB

[garyb]

Gene, they do its called "mailwasher" has a feature to bounce emails back to their sender as if the email address does not exist.

[dana_swift]

Its not possible to return spam. Spam almost always originates from a computer that is NOT a server. Any computer can send spam, as sending mail only requires a program to run on the computer. Sometimes that is a real benefit, but as we all know it is totally abused. The proposals to "tax" all sent mail will not work, as spammers wont pay the tax, just us citizens, as the tax would only apply to email sent from mail-servers.

Since most computers do not have email accounts, the computers that send the junk cannot be replied to. The MAIL protocol was one of the earliest defined capabilities of the internet. No protection was built in, as everybody in the handfull of academics online at the time was trusted, and trustworthy. The idea that this system would become a worldwide communications media never occurred to anybody at the time.

There have been some really good proposals to nuke spam by verifying the legitimacy of the sender automatically, however the motive for profit means each company wants a proprietary method that they control exclusively. Hence nothing gained critical mass, and has done anything other than make legitimate email more difficult to send.

Enough rant

D

[knight_toolworks]

one tool that helped me a lot was www.spamcop.com (http://www.spamcop.com). using it to report spams really cut down on the mount I had. but also using separate emails for posting and buying and such helps keep spam down. still 99% of my spams go to my first email account that I have had for 10 years. almost non to my cncrouting email.