Hotmail is Spammers Heaven!

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Phantasm66

Posts: 4,909   +8
It’s becoming more and more of a problem all the time, to the extent that it's almost rendering Hotmail completely useless - SPAM! Right now, I am trying to use my Hotmail account for job search correspondence. And all would be well, if it wasn't for the horrendous amount of spam I receive on a daily, and now almost hourly basis. Get rich quick scams, creams to increase the size of your genitalia, liquid Viagra, get a degree by doing absolutely nothing or click here to meet single women in your area - there it all is, intermixed with legitimate mail. And there's so much of it that sorting the spam from the real stuff is just getting to be too much of a pain. Hotmail has a huge problem not just with the amount of spam sent to accounts but the amount of Hotmail accounts used to send spam!

But now, it looks like a lot of the problems with spam and Hotmail are due to a new vulnerability in the Hotmail service that allows spammers to script their spam sending.

"Hotmail has always been a problematic spam source. The saving grace has been that the spam had to be transmitted manually, through a web form, so the sending rate was limited by how fast the spammer could cut-n-paste. Now that Microsoft has provided this new programmatic interface for spammers, that limit has been removed. Spammers may now script their spam runs--and they do--which has created a huge increase in spam transmitted by Hotmail. Out of my last 25 Hotmail spams, 2 were transmitted by web form and the rest by the DAV exploit: a 2200% increase!"

More here.
 
Here's an example of a message source, sent by another hotmail account (the spammer) to mine:

X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jEHjJx36Oi8+Q1OJDRSDidP
Received: from washingtonpost.com ([218.119.48.57]) by mc9-f23.bay6.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600);
Sun, 8 Jun 2003 05:16:22 -0700
Message-ID: <7fc2cc6f1abd$be00ef4d$a05f818f@zm98ng1>
From: "Chloe Long" <chloe.longlc@washingtonpost.com>
To: dsooman@hotmail.com
Subject: How do you use this?
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 12:18:37 +0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106
Return-Path: chloe.longlc@washingtonpost.com
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 08 Jun 2003 12:16:23.0620 (UTC) FILETIME=[C6ED2040:01C32DB7]

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Notice this line:

Received: from washingtonpost.com ([218.119.48.57]) by mc9-f23.bay6.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600);

Now, if that had appeared as this:

Received: from washingtonpost.com ([218.119.48.57]) by mc9-f23.bay6.hotmail.com with DAV;

Then I would know that this DAV exploit I have posted about above had been used to send this mail.
 
Netscape Webmail appears to be another house of spam. Really wish there is a law prohibiting online retailers from selling email addresses, instead of the "check here if you do not wish to receive promotional offers from [XXX]" crap (which sometimes does not even appear).
 
I just wish it was illegal to send spam at all. I don't care how its done - I just want it gone!

I would agree to even the most draconian of laws, which would even have its bad sides, if it meant that there was an internet with no spam.

Spam is KILLING THE INTERNET and it needs to die.
 
This just again goes to show just how clueless MS really is in the big picture...
This feels just like an MS Technet conference I attended here in Sweden a while ago, where the officials from MS got the question "how have you worked to increase security in the new version of Office?"
The reply: "Security? That's nothing we work towards at MS"
 
increase the size of your genitalia?

Bonza :D

i mean...errrrr....

I used to get 200+ spam mails a day, coz of my mails signing me up to stuff, sucks...i had to change mail addy :(
 
Biggest mistake you can ever make is, when logging on to an ftp server anonymously, and it prompts for your e-mail address as password, you actually give it. That's suicide.
 
I haven't tried this and I really don't know what good it might be except a little satisfation to find out where this crap comes from, but look at this. It's a mail tracker.
 
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