Porn-related spam proves relentless

The Denver Post ^ | 12/22/02 | Jennifer Beauprez

[Drew68]

Interesting albeit long article.

I have a couple of yahoo email addresses. One gets filled up with nearly 50 emails daily of mostly porn spam.

I made the mistake of clicking on one of them and found my homepage hijacked. I could not reset it either. Eventually I had to go find some file hidden away in my computer and remove it in order to change my homepage back.

They can be insidious.

[ex-Texan]

"You could be a 50-year-old grandmother who never says darn in front of your grandkids; you open one of these pictures, and it will curl your toes," said Joyce Graff, an analyst who has researched the topic for the Gartner Group, a business consulting firm ***"

Actually, those spammers are sending out photos of *50 year old grandmothers* doing everything and everybody, and they have their toes curled, too.

[Gorzaloon]

Maybe the porn spams will FINALLY get Congress, ISP's and backbones, etc. to stop taking bribes from the Direct Marketing Association, and start actually doing something about spam.

No legitimate product has ever been sold with spam, nor would any ever be, because of the spam reputation. Much of it touts products that Attorneys General had long ago banned...Quack medicines, pyramid scemes, etc.

Every e-mail that says "I made $150,000 last year (stuffing envelopes at home/multilevel martketing/etc.)" gets sent right to the IRS.

[UB355]

I don't have much of a problem with this. Number one I have a Mac, and number two I got rid of AOL and have an e-mail program with decent filtering, and number three I have a nifty little program that screens the e-mail on my providers server. I can delete any item that looks supicious without downloading it to my computer

[DoughtyOne]

I'm trying to figure out which of my "friends" suggested someone contact me with information on how to increase the pre-existing, if you catch my drift. LOL

Actually this isn't funny. I frequently get eMails that don't sound like porn. Once you open them up there are Tripple-X graphics inside. Since the mailer didn't know me, they don't know if I'm a kid or not. They send this stuff out and kids see it. No young kid should have to deal with this stuff. For crying out loud, let them be kids.

I consider this stuff to be as bad as pedophilic (Sp?) materials, because it is corrupting to the mind of a child. If the courts want to throw the mailers of this stuff into prison and throw away the key, it's fine by me.

[cebadams]

I have a Mac (OSX) and am not using AOL. What's your nifty little program called?

[Poohbah]

I checked my spam filter...it's got over one hundred DOMAIN NAMES in it (I filter by domain name, with exceptions for legitimate addresses on each domain.)

[UB355]

POPmonitor


http://www.vechtwijk.nl/dev/popmonitor/


It lets you see the list of e-mails on the server, it lets you delete them without downloading them.

[Drango]

"Just because something may be pornographic, it doesn't mean it's stripped from its First Amendment right," said Marv Johnson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union,

It should be legal to beat the living snot out of all ACLU attorneys.

[UB355]

It is $25.00 Shareware, but to me well worth it.

[DoughtyOne]

I read your italicized quote and thought the same thing you did before I read your comment. I very seldom see anything worthwhile come out of the ACLU. And if I find myself in agreement with them, I review my own opinoins on the subject extensively.

[DoughtyOne]

Which one are you using?

[amigatec]

Well I run a Linux based firewall and installed DansGuardian as a content filter. It works fairly well, but I still get spam from time to time. I can stop the popups good but the spam is still bad.

[sweetliberty]

If the feds want to spy on internet activity, they should start with the perpetrators of this crap and leave the surfing habits of private citizens PRIVATE! I am offended and outraged to constantly find this garbage in my email and seldom use my yahoo email box any more because of it. I would not allow a child access to the internet that wasn't strictly supervised AT ALL TIMES!

[UB355]

I don't know if any of you have taken a look at Netscape 7.0.
It works pretty well, has a great pop up blocker built in and a very good e-pmail filtering system already set up. Additions to it are a breeze.

[cebadams]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I have been using
http://sneakemail.com
for a few years now with some success. This isn't a filter program at all. Instead you create these fake email addresses that autoforward any mail you receive from one of them to your valid email accounts. While it doesn't stop the spam, if you set up a different fake account for any site you register for you can easily determine which sites have sold your email account. Then, by deleting the fake account, you stop the spam from those sites.

Anyway, it works for me.

[sweetliberty]

"It should be legal to beat the living snot out of all ACLU attorneys."

ROTFL! You could probably make a case for that.

[Jhoffa_]

The graphic nature of some of these e-mails is shocking: naked women performing oral sex with guns pressed to their heads, women in pigtails pretending to be daughters having sex with their fathers, naked men sprawled on the floor, and website links promising pictures of gay young boys.

And that's just the dnc fundraising spam..

[Capt. Tom]

A few years ago when I started up my website which is about sharks and shark fishing, I was getting enough traffic to overrun my monthly throughput allowance and my site was getting shut down. So I had to get another web host.

On a fishing site I clicked on what I thought was a fishing link and it took me into the world of porn. I spent some time there and although most mere mortal men might be distracted by the color photos of all kinds of sexual perversions hour after hour I was struck by how fast the pornographers could deliver a web page.

Click!Bang! There's the page full of graphics. No waiting. That's how I want my website to come down. So I e- mail them to find out who hosts them and could I get my non-adult site hosted and for how much. Does their web host also host non-adult sites?

Turns out they host only their own filthy, perverted, anti women, anti christian degenerate trash on their own servers.

But they did give me a lead and it worked out.

It amazes me how the Govt. with billions of dollars, can put up a buoy report site that when I click on it I can't get the report quickly. If you search the congressional record you could fall asleep waiting to get an answer.

Click !Bang! It's there. That has to be a factor in porns success on the web. - Tom

[Dr. Scarpetta]

I had a problem with outrageous porn solicitations in Outlook Express, plus a virus. We changed our e-mail address and got rid of the pornographers! Also, we spent 6 hrs getting rid of the virus and installing the latest Norton. Now I use Yahoo for e-mail but don't give out the address unless it's necessary and no longer communicate with people who only send jokes. I figure that's probably how I got the virus.