[Rd] Spam messages

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi,

FWIW, I checked the R-Devel subscriber list of e-mail addresses (as Co-Admin with Martin I have access). There are presently 1,296 subscribers to individual posts and 746 to post digests on R-Devel.

Neither of the two e-mail addresses referenced below as being the sources of spam are listed as subscribers.

A Google search of those two e-mail addresses also came up empty. The "octbm.com <http://octbm.com/>" domain is legitimate, though the web site is "under construction" and the whois information shows that it was registered earlier this year by a person in Bangladesh who seems to own a large number of domains:

  http://www.domainiq.com/email?mesba.cit06@gmail.com

There are a lot of technical ways of falsely generating those two e-mail addresses of course and an inspection of the full e-mail headers might be fruitful, although there are ways of manipulating those as well.

Regards,

Marc


> On Dec 6, 2016, at 10:20 AM, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
> 
> I agree that no action should be taken.
> 
> It's somewhat mystifying that the robot known as "Amy Kristen"
> responds so quickly after my post, and with such regularity (so far
> twice per hour), using perhaps several email addresses - and using the
> correct "Reply-To" headers. But more mystifying is that she keeps the
> same name the whole time. And lucky, I guess, because otherwise I
> wouldn't know how to filter her out...
> 
> On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 10:02:11AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> This topic has come up previously, across the R e-mail lists and the spammers need not be subscribers (but could be), but simply reasonably competent HTML scrapers.
>> 
>> If you look at the online archives of the R lists, for example R-Devel for this month:
>> 
>>    https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-December/thread.html>
>> 
>> and look at the individual posts, there is only minimal munging of e-mail addresses, which is easily overcome with basic scripting.
>> 
>> This is further compounded by there being a multitude of other places on the web, where actively updated archives of the R lists exist, providing additional sources of e-mail addresses for spammers.
>> 
>> Some of the prior discussions had considered that we might preserve only the list address in the posts sent out (as some groups do) and fully scrape the sender's e-mail address from the post when distributed and archived. However, that approach is not without it's own limitations (e.g. would make cc's and reply-all largely useless, except for off-list discussion) and so no action has been taken since this seems to be a transient issue.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Marc Schwartz
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 6, 2016, at 7:52 AM, Mario Emmenlauer <mario at emmenlauer.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The problem is not specific to this list. Any kind of public
>>> list may mean that other subscribers (or even the whole world)
>>> can see your email address. So whenever you mail to a (public)
>>> list there is a good chance that afterwards, you will get more
>>> spam. Not really much can be done about it, at least not on
>>> the side of the list, since any of the subscribers may be a
>>> spammer, who can know...
>>> 
>>> All the best,
>>> 
>>>   Mario
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 06.12.2016 14:13, frederik at ofb.net wrote:
>>>> Yes, I just heard from Amy Kristen who is "looking to meet new
>>>> guys"...
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 11:31:56AM -0800, Kenny Bell wrote:
>>>>> Have others received spam messages after posting to this list?
>>>>> 
>>>>> The two problem emails are HodgesDonna485 at yahoo.com and
>>>>> amykristen4003 at octbm.com.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>>> 
>>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Viele Gruesse,
>>> 
>>>   Mario Emmenlauer
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> BioDataAnalysis GmbH, Mario Emmenlauer      Tel. Buero: +49-89-74677203
>>> Balanstr. 43                   mailto: memmenlauer * biodataanalysis.de
>>> D-81669 München                          http://www.biodataanalysis.de/
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
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>> 


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