I just received an email from Ray Grauberger, who has a website that is still under construction.
I have never met the guy, I had never been to his website, yet I get an email out of the blue that is obscene and vile.

What is with this guy? Anyone know him and can help me find out what is up?

Mike S.

My guess would be that Ray Grauberger is just an everyday surfer just like the rest of us except that he was unlucky enough to get his name on a spam list. Spam lists are used two (2) ways. The primary way is as a source for sending spam. We all know this. The other is as a source of legitimate names that are attached to spam to give them legitimacy. I found this out when I started getting flooded with returned mail for invalid addresses. I looked over some of them an determined that my name and email address had been used on spam as the originator. I was even threatened with legal action by administrators from AOL until I pointed out that the spam originated from AOL. I have heard nothing more from AOL.

Yeah, I'm getting the same thing.. (someone's logged on to my machine at home, and is 'sending' spam..

Amazing how somehting that's supposed to make our life easier, has in fact, been 'hijacked' by a bunch of: 1) bad marketing types who use it as a tool to sell EVERYTHING to EVERYONE in EVERY COUNTRY! (and are never valid outside USA)
2) boared MCSE techies and / or MIT Graduates who can't ge a job...

So, they ruin it for the rest of us.

Get a spam buster or spybot scanner for your howm computer, and run it!

I would think that if this was an attempt to sell me something. The vulargity was simply stated and directed at me. I have a spambot and even use anonamizer when I visit strange websites, so my email address is not hijacked. Unfortunately, I visit eBay often, and I think they are allowing or selling email addresses to be used. When I am off eBay a long time, my spam drops off, and picks up right away when I go back.

Think of the odds; if some bot has obtained his address of his website, how likely is it that a random bot would send me an email, another active rc modeler?

Mike

They don't have to log into your system to send spam. All they do is use your email address. This is called "spoofing". If you look at the header, you will see that your email address is used as the sending address and/or the return address. Then look at the originating network address and you will find that it is not yours. It will normally be from an Asian or European country.

I don't know how this is done but I often get spam that is spoofed as some kind of R/C related ad. The only way that I can think that this is done is that it is pulled from rec.models.rc.air. In that way, the spammer knows what your interests are and what kind of heading will get your attention causing you to open the spam.

There are a lot of different ways that your email address can be hijacked. It is a common fact that companies sell email addresses. There was a big lawsuit against AOL just a few years ago when they told that they would be selling the email address after they had already done it. Their lawyers contended that they owned the email addresses so they had a right to sell them. They lost the case but the damage had already been done and it took a lot of effort on the part of AOL and its customers to correct the problem.

There are two (2) methods of gaining email addresses that are very effective and are probably the most commonly used. The first is to scan internet news articles parcing for the '@' character and capture the email address from that. Quite often the scanning program mistakenly picks up something else but it doesn't matter since the spamming program ignores errors. The same method is used to scan source files for home pages. Most scanning programs are not intelligent enough to step any deeper than the parent page. Email addresses that are below the parent page are usually safe.

Everytime software houses come up with a new way to block spam, spammers come up with a new way to bypass them. It has gotten very difficult to determine the originating ISP. Many spammers are now getting their network addresses registered through InterNIC rather than going through an ISP for the simple reason that in doing that, they don't have to answer to anyone, even the federal government.

The laws against spam are no longer effective, primarily because spammers don't leave a trail so they cannot be prosecuted. Apparently, spamming is really big business. The federal government is not in a position to track down spammers. It is going to take the network businesses to stop the spammers. That will not happen as long as they are making money through the efforts of spammers. They turn a blind eye to their practices. The only way the government is going to be able to place any control on spamming is to hold the businesses responsible for spammers. Spammers are paid according to the number of hits that are made on a business web page giving credit to the spammers. This is the one trail that law enforcement can follow.

here's the address header of the email below. The path seems to be normal for all road runner email I normally receive.

MIke



Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from ms-mta-01 (ms-mta-01-mss [10.24.10.5])
by ms-mss-01.columbus.rr.com
(iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.12 (built Feb 13 2003))
with ESMTP id <[email protected]> for
mikeslaughter%cinci.rr.com@ims-ms-daemon; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:03:28 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from ncmx01.mgw.rr.com (ncmx01.mgw.rr.com [24.25.4.95])
by ms-mta-01.columbus.rr.com
(iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 HotFix 1.12 (built Feb 13 2003))
with ESMTP id <[email protected]> for
[email protected] (ORCPT [email protected]); Mon,
29 Sep 2003 16:03:23 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from mail.rcmodeler.net
(mia-mail-2.cfm-resources.com [199.239.130.10])
by ncmx01.mgw.rr.com (8.12.8p1/8.12.8) with ESMTP id h8TK2wZW015447 for
<[email protected]>; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:04:32 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from dell500 [66.140.93.95] by mail.rcmodeler.net with ESMTP
(SMTPD32-8.02) id A0501A00BA; Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:04:32 -0400
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:59:36 -0500
From: Ray Grauberger <[email protected]>
Subject:
To: [email protected]
Message-id: <000001c386c4$3936a3a0$c878fea9@dell500>
MIME-version: 1.0
X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2616
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0001_01C3869A.50609BA0"
Importance: Normal
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-priority: Normal
X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine
Original-recipient: rfc822;[email protected]

I am not very experienced in reading complex headers but his email seems to have originated from Southwestern Bell Internet Services. I would forward the email with the header intact to [email protected] and let them get to the bottom of it.

My ISP has a spam filter that is fantastic. If you don't have my password I will not get the mail, period. Not one bit of spam in three months, weeehaw.

I was hit twice thru my AOL account. Someone sends me an e-mail, I open it thinking it is a valid e-mail. It is actually a Trojan Horse that then uses my address to send out tons of spam. AOL shuts my account down until I call them to find out why then have to change passwords.etc. These punks are a real pain. and tey are probably a bunch of kids with nothing better to do. So, do not open any e-mails you are not certain of the sender.
Bill
[link]http://www.bp55899.com[/link]

I was in a fruit jiuce hut last winter, and on thir cups, they had a lot of 'fun facts'

One of them was this: "With the increase in viruses and spam, the internet will be rendered usless in 2007"

something to think about...