Baratta Design Blog

Hard to believe in this day and age there are still people who believe spam and drug fraud offers come from the email address listed in the email! I will likely have to repeat myself a few dozens times year after year.

No point in buying 'SpamArrest' and sending one of those click here to prove you are a person non-sense. All you are doing is bouncing your spam to someone whos email address was used as the return address! Get yourself a Gmail account and Google will stripout all the garbage for you. This is currently the ONLY way to slow down spam and frauds, get a Gmail account! Don't waste your money on useless software. 

Now instead of just getting a few hundred of the same drug scam emails I also received a bounce from some person named Brian asking me to verify that I am a person sending him his shit! Sorry buddy but I don't know who the heck you are and I don't want your bounced e-mail either. I will report you for spam!

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There is no point in wasting your time worrying about Spam or trying to stop it. It will never be possible to stop Spam as long as accreditation is given to companies to sell domains that have no intension of following any of the rules.

Combine that main factor with the thousands of servers that will relay any email because they are not set up correctly and you have an impossible situation. A situation that could be changed for the better tomorrow but it will not.

These domain registrars that know how to pay the game are making millions of dollars and so is the company that give them the rights to sell domains.

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The latest flood of Spam has lots of Russian bride offers or a Virus that Google will just leave on your server if you are using their fine service. Lots of Bride offers and lots of Postcards or Delivery Service company false notices.

It's just insane how much we get to just one email address let alone all the rest. Typical one after the other every few seconds even to the same email address! Grant it the Virus ones are likely automated from an infected computer, maybe, maybe not.

These guys sending this crap are just out of their freaking minds! Does anyone really click on this non-sense? Is it doing something for anyone? I suppose if they hook your computer with a Virus and manage to capture your keystrokes they may get into an account.

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 I can personally tell you this is real. I was using IE 8 the other day and was hit by several viruses while viewing websites that I thought were safe. My virus program picked them up and cleaned them. See News 11:30am here in Vancouver for more advise.

Operation Aurora one of the most sophisticated attacks in years
Erin Loxam Jan 18, 2010 07:33:15 AM
7 Recommendation(s)

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - It's the most popular web browser. But it turns out Internet Explorer is vulnerable to widespread cyber attacks.

Operation Aurora is to blame. The cyberheist, linked to China by Google, is targetting valuable intellectual property of major organizations.  McAfee warns the code is now public and anyone using Internet Explorer could be at risk for what is described as the largest and most sophisticated cyber attack in years.

Microsoft has acknowledged the vulnerability of its browser and is currently working on a patch. Protect yourself by making sure your anti-virus is using the latest threat definition files and update that firewall as soon as possible. You can also use other browsers in the meantime.

More tips from McAfee can be found here.

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I was just checking out the new form maker from Aweber. It's about time Aweber got with it in regards to better looking forms! Now a days we all expect a lot more for our several hundred dollars per year to have a Professional service handle our e-mailing.

I hope their next step is to update their HTML templates and get rid of the old looking themes in there! 

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Are Spam sender's getting dumb and dumber? This is the latest footer I started receiving today. Check out the phone numbers! The line below here about letting them know if I would like my Spam sent to a different email address is especially funny because they already are sending the same piece of Spam to every e-mail address I have every few minutes! LOL

" Tell us if you would like your email sent to a different address.

See our Privacy Statement or call 1-123-1243-3454 from the U.S. & Canada or +34663-46346-34646 in all other countries to learn more about our data collection and usage practices.

Review the Pfizer Guest program Terms and Conditions.

Let us know if you prefer not to receive future promotional emails from Starwood Hotels & Resorts. It may take up to ten business days to make the requested change and there is a slight chance that you may receive email from us within that time.  "

Of course the e-mail was From me to Me! LOL  You shouldn't get all freaked out about the from me to me, there just using a ' Tag ' that inserts the e-mail address they are sending the Spam to, into the from field. Everyone sees their own email address as the sender of the Spam. Tags are not part of the issue at all, tags are something you have likely used or seen many times, like when you login to a site and it shows your name, thats a tag. Nothing wrong with Tags!

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Anyone who has ever tried to upgrade their Joomla 1.0x to the 1.5x knows that it could fail.  Not a straightforward FTP thats for sure! You need to migrate your 1.0 to 1.5 in order to pull it off and that's no guarantee it will work.

You also have to find the right migration component to even stand a chance at upgrading from 1.0 to 1.5. There's also a possibility of issues with particular components needing their own migration script.

Now Joomla 1.6 is due to come out perhaps in August of 2009.  The new Joomla 1.6 will be dropping the Section's part of the control panel and adding nested categories. There also adding in a basic access level and group component.

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Looks like one of the bigger Spam outfits are back in business this July 2009. The increase in phishing scam's is up a few thousand percent this month.

Lots of these titles in my Gmail Spam folder " You have received an eCard " this one isn't the virus one this month, or at least the email does not contain the actual exe file like it did last month, this month it's a link to a website which may or may not contain the Virus to hook your computer into sending more spam. I assume once they hook a bunch they have to get down to business and actually use the bot net of infected computers. I never mentioned the domain in these ones but today it changed to a Google Groups link, Google groups gets lots of abuse!

And this is the latest attempt to trick people into opening the e-mail " Delivery Status Notification (Failure) ", this one is an older one with a new title, same players just a different title for the phishing spam. The Delivery Status one also comes under the title Re-order or Your Order and bogus number in the title.

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Are you clicking on the block sender in your Webmail or other mail programs? If you are you may be causing you or your webmaster a very large headache.

All the spam and phishing scams we receive daily DO NOT use their own email address as the  'reply to'. In fact they may be using your email address as the reply to or sender of the email. What this means is if you hit the block sender button you just blacklisted your own email address from receiving emails from your customers and friends.

So how are they putting your email address in as the sender? They are simply using any mail programs that accepts 'Tags'. A tag is just a method of pulling a persons information up and inserting it into the email. Just like you may have used with an auto-responder.

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I noticed my Gmail address was showing 3850 e-mails in the spam folder. So I was interested in seeing when I stopped deleting them. Google's dates started to show 1970 when I hit the button to see the beginning of the 38 hundred emails in the spam box. I haven't had a Gmail e-mail that long, mirror bug!

Once I clicked my way up to number 3500 the date was March 22-2009. So in about two months I've received most of these to just one e-mail address!

Most of the e-mails are phishing (fishing) that look like a Newsletter for some Health outfit. I trace a few to keep up on where the crap is coming from.

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