[Dixielandjazz] More on hacking, spoofing, spam, etc.

[John McClernan]

From Apple Mail's help desk:

Returning unwanted messages
To discourage someone from sending you messages, you can reject or “bounce” messages from that person, as long as the return address is valid. Bouncing messages can be useful for rejecting mass mailings from companies whose mailing lists you’ve been added to after buying products.

To bounce unwanted messages:

Select one or more unwanted messages.

Choose Message > Bounce.

The senders receive a reply indicating that your email address is not valid and that the messages could not be delivered. The messages are moved to your Trash folder.

Many unsolicited (“spam”) messages do not have valid return addresses, and can’t be bounced back to the original sender. If you try to bounce a message that has an invalid return address, it’s returned to you as undeliverable.

You can create a rule that automatically deletes messages from a specific sender. Or, use the junk mail filter to remove messages that are likely to be junk mail.

Cheers,
John


On Jul 13, 2012, at 12:57 PM, Dick Baker wrote:

Here's another factor to keep in mind:  Spammers are constantly on the prowl for valid email addresses to add to their list.  And spammers use bots to comb through web pages looking for character strings that follow the pattern of somebody at someplace.com/edu/org, etc.

Fortunately for the sake of our convenience--and for the convenience of spammers--all our messages on DJML are posted at our archive web site, and they definitely make use of it.  The first email address I used on DJML started collecting lots of spam after a few years, so I changed it to the one I have now, djml at dickbaker.org.  But that too is starting to get a fair amount of spam--and since the ONLY place I use that address is here, any spam that comes to that address is clearly from that archive.