iBurst email woes

Bierrie

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Since about Nov/Dec 2008 I started receiving junk email from people with “wbs” extensions. I then registered with My Broadband with the exclusive intention to check whether other users have had the same experience. But then I decided to let some time pass first. Since then a couple more have come in.

For example: [email protected] subject: Rainbow [Ticket ID Fiesta] 555 now, it is real Pyramid

For example: [email protected] subject: Forget about weak health

I just find it strange that I have a wbs address (which is not widely publicized) and for the first time I'm now receiving spam from senders who also have wbs addresses!? Is it possible that my (and other users') privacy have been compromised? Or maybe some employees are moonlighting? Has anyone else had this experience?

Still with emails. I find myself, once again all of a sudden, in the position that emails does not reach their destinations consistently. Emails are send out and they would then appear in my “Sent” folder. But quite a few unrelated recipients told me that they've never received the email when I follow it up or resend it a second time. (In stead of phoning to check whether someone received his/her email, I resend it after a week or two, depending on how critical feedback is. I mean, to phone with every email would defy the cost advantage of email). Could poor/fluctuating signal strength maybe cause this problem?

These two events are probably totally unrelated, but they nevertheless emerged more or less at the same time.
 
Have you reported these rascals to iBurst? It is important that you do so that iBurst's IP addresses don't get blacklisted - something that may be the cause of your second problem that you are facing.
 
No I haven't. Come to think about it, I'm not sure why not.

I get a fair share of spam a day, but they are usually from far away places. Fortunately the software stops it, then I just scan and delete it before downloading the good mail.

I find their admin poor and to get past their call centre a challenge. But if you think it could have an effect on the consistency, then I'll do so ... actually didn't think the two issues might be linked!

And as I've said, I thought maybe give it a little time. Maybe it will blow over. Doesn't seem so.

The other type of spam which I get a lot of as well, is from a Canadian Pharmacy. The strange thing about those emails are that there is not a sender line in the heading. But that is something for another time :-)
 
E-Mail 'sender'

No I haven't. Come to think about it, I'm not sure why not.

I get a fair share of spam a day, but they are usually from far away places. Fortunately the software stops it, then I just scan and delete it before downloading the good mail.

I find their admin poor and to get past their call centre a challenge. But if you think it could have an effect on the consistency, then I'll do so ... actually didn't think the two issues might be linked!

And as I've said, I thought maybe give it a little time. Maybe it will blow over. Doesn't seem so.

The other type of spam which I get a lot of as well, is from a Canadian Pharmacy. The strange thing about those emails are that there is not a sender line in the heading. But that is something for another time :-)

If you know what you are doing it is very easy to send an e-mail with absolutely anybody as the 'sender'...
I am not going to go into the details here before it gives more people some ideas...
 
When I first switched to iBurst I had a lot of emails go missing, even though they were shown as having been sent. Eventually it was traced to my SMTP setting on my email client. After that things seemed ok.
 
Its similar to something I noticed when I was with telskum...

I had created an alias email address, which I never ended up using... EVER... I had actually forgotten I even created it, then suddenly I started getting ridiculous amount of spam, I'm talking 20+ spam mails a day, and I realized they had been addressed to my alias address... now how is it possible that I'll get mail on an address not known to to anyone, or even myself, lol... I highly doubt theres someone with a program randomly generating email addresses, lol...

The simplest conclusion I could come to was: some scaly b@st3rd at telskum selling email addys.

Needless to say, I promptly terminated the service.
 
I highly doubt theres someone with a program randomly generating email addresses, lol...

Unfortunately, this is actually a sad truth. Maybe one of the spam messages had HTML code in it that flagged the mail ass successfully read, but that still does mean that you would get such a high volume.
 
Unfortunately, this is actually a sad truth. Maybe one of the spam messages had HTML code in it that flagged the mail ass successfully read, but that still does mean that you would get such a high volume.

Hmmm, its very suspect... I actually remember my father picking up a rather nasty virus the other day, noticed our broadband overhead with running high, installed a packet sniffer on his pc and found a spam mail being sent ever 5 sec from his pc. :eek: Scary stuff!
 
Mailwasher

Although I'm not one for conspiracy theories, I think this is what I thought it will be. I've been using MailwasherPro for years to reduce spam. The other day I was checking something in the program, when I ended up viewing "Blacklist". This is a list of email addresses which the program has blacklisted based on my behaviour. There are roughly 50 different email addresses all from @wbs.co.za.

In the meantime I've send an email to [email protected]

The strange thing is they all start with "a" ie

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Maybe they'll still get to "b" lol. To extract this info (to pass onto iBurst) is a bit difficult. Let me follow up.
 
It is called spoofing.

Spammers will spoof the domain (the part after the @) on the emails they send out to make it look legitimate.

It's a nightmare for sysadmins, especially when they get deluged with emails and phone calls from world+dog as to why they're getting spam from sysadmin's company...
 
The strange thing is they all start with "a" ie

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Maybe they'll still get to "b" lol. To extract this info (to pass onto iBurst) is a bit difficult. Let me follow up.

This is called an email dictionary attack/spam. Hard to define what exactly, but some program generate random names from aaaaaa up to zzzzzzz.

it will go through the various letters of the alphabet, generating a couple of bogus names.
 
No wonder

At last, thanks The_Librarian.

With 43 000+ posts behind you no wonder you got the answer :)

I didn't even know such stuff exist.
 
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