Spam with random letter sequences

[Rick Cooper]

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info 
 > [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On 
 > Behalf Of David Lee
 > Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:47 AM
 > To: MailScanner discussion
 > Subject: Re: Spam with random letter sequences
 > 
 > On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Julian Field wrote:
 > 
 > > Anyone been seeing any spam that looks like this?
 > 
 > Yes.
 > 
 > > Anyone know any good ways of stopping it?
 > 
 > No.
 > 
 > But it seems genuinely to come through "yahoo" (judging by 
 > the "Received:"
 > field as it hops over the garden wall into our jurisdiction).
 > 
 > We've been seeing it for several days.  The content seems 
 > too random for
 > Bayes to do anything systematically reliably with it.  And 
 > the embedded
 > URLs seem to hop about, possibly too fast for the blacklists 
 > (accessed via
 > SA) to keep pace.  (We also use "spamhaus", via JANET, to do 
 > MTA blocking,
 > which may stop some; but there's a lot still gets through.)
 > 
 > I wonder how much Yahoo are doing to try to block it?
 > 
 > -- 
 I would think you are seeing the results of the hotmail/live/yahoo/gmail
captchas being cracked over the last few months. I get tons of stuff in from
valid yahoo/hotmail accounts but so far they have been quite easy to block
and the urls contained within seem to show up on the url black lists within
24 hrs anyway. One I constantly see is To: OneRandomLetter
<someone at hotmail.com> with the to envelope being a valid local email
address. The subject is hi/hello/good day and the body has nothing but a
url. It comes straight from legit yahoo mail servers. We are really
beginning to pay for these "free" email accounts.

Rick


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