[ale] OT: spam from msn??

[Mike Murphy]

chances are its not actually coming from MSN. Check the full headers to 
see if the message really originated from MSN or not (and remember, many 
mail servers don't check to see if your mailer is who it says it is -- 
in other words the claimed hostname may be something at msn.com, but if 
you check the reverse dns entry of the IP it won't be).

It is likely that a spammer has just latched onto this particular 
identity to use for his return address. This is a common practice these 
days: some spam preventitives require that bounces work. In other words, 
send a message to a server somewhere that bounces, then have the mailer 
fail to deliver that bounce, and your return address goes on a 
blacklist. So a spammer will find a good return address, and use that, 
so when bad addresses bounce, they have somewhere to go. @msn.com and 
@earthlink.com are good addresses to use for this reason, since they 
have very strong spam preventitives themselves, and the victim of this 
practice often has no idea that they are getting 1000s of bounces a day.

*if* it turns out the emails seem to actually be coming MSN, then 
believe it or not, MSN's anti-spam department (and yes, they have a 
whole department dedicated to stopping spam) will be interested. Go 
ahead and send it to abuse at msn.com, with a full copy of the email 
including headers, and a blurb describing the behavior you've seen 
similar to the one below.

Mike


Geoffrey wrote:
> Routinely, I run through the postings to the ale list which are held, 
> primarily because they are posted by non-members.  As you might expect, 
> 99% of them are spam.  Over the past couple of days, I've seen a huge 
> rise in the number of multiple spam messages by the same id and in every 
> case the id is an msn id.  Generally, I see 1 sometimes 2 messages from 
> the same id.  Recently though, I've seen instances of over 40 messages 
> from the same msn id.  I'd say that I've dropped over 300 messages that 
> have been posted by 5-10 different msn ids in the last 2 days.
> 
> Anyone know what's up, other than msn obviously is not dealing with 
> spammers?
> 

-- 

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Mike Murphy
781 Inman Mews Drive Atlanta GA 30307
Landline: 404-653-1070
Mobile: 404-545-6234
Email: mike at tyderia.net
Email Pager: pagemike at tyderia.net
AIM: mmichael453
JDAM: 33:45:14.0584N  84:21:43.038W
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+