Spam Re: just found new website?

[Deidre]

At 03:20 PM 1/14/03 +0000, Amy wrote:

>Illyana wrote:
>
> > A note to everyone on this group: messages like that are almost
> > always spam.
>
>We certainly consider them spam, and delete them as soon as we see
>them.  Even with Mods, Elves and Geists on three continents and in
>many time zones, we sometimes don't catch these things for several
>hours, but we will delete them and ban the poster.
>
>Thanks,
>Amy Z
>for the HPfGU Magical Moderator team

Thanks for doing that, and banning the spammer. But the Alphabet Spammer 
has as many names as one can imagine with the usage of 12 letters of the 
alphabet in any given email addy, so that's a lot of email addys to have to 
kick and ban. (Said spammer is mostly likely a bot, btw.) However, for 
those of us on digest, even if someone deletes the spam in a very timely 
fashion, it *still* shows up in the digest. (To get rid of the spam, I will 
have to send the digest back to myself, and edit out the large spam 
post.)  This is just the way Yahoo Groups does things. This little problem 
of YG has been discussed quite a bit on the various list-owners and 
moderators groups/lists here. I still think that if the list 
owner/moderators would just make the list Restricted, we would not have 
this spam. It's been shown that spammers, as a general rule, do not usually 
join lists where they have to jump thru even a small hoop of having someone 
rubberstamp their joining. The digest from yesterday with the *huge* 
religious spam probably got truncated for some of the list members, 
depending on how their ISP handles large posts. And AOL is known for 
converting very large posts into attachments, which is something that most 
people would not be expecting of a Yahoo Group list. Back to the Alphabet 
Spammer, as s/he is known on the list owner/moderators lists, it is not a 
good thing to click on the links offered by said spammer, as one can fall 
into a nasty trap of multiple-owning browsers, ie, lots of 
pop-ups-and-unders. Some of these links have led to porno sites in the 
past; others are speculated to take one to a web site where there is some 
exploitive code to get one to download an executable file to allow these 
spammers a back door into one's PC. Best bet is to never download something 
that you don't want that is being pushed on you by a strange website, and 
virus scan all files, especially attachments, before opening.

HTH,
Deidre