Reports on eWeek.com and on SearchSecurity.com claim that a highly sophisticated Russian bot-net is pumping out the current surge in image spam.

According to a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, the bot-netters grew their 70,000 strong zombie network with the SpamThru trojan, an innovative piece of malware which not only packs its own pirated version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus to eradicate any competing malware from infected computers, but also uses a list of proxy servers to evade blacklisting by anti-spam agencies.

The researcher also claims to have uncovered evidence that the spammers harvested lists of email addresses from financial institutions:

It also appears the spammer made an effort to obtain more targeted lists of email addresses by hacking into smaller investment news Web sites and other e-businesses and downloading their user databases,” he said. “This is likely due to the fact that pump-and-dump stock spam seems to be a primary motive of the botnet.

Mail.app users can get some level of protection by creating a rule to filter some of these images spams out.

David Reitter takes a slightly different approach with a different rule.

Fastmail users (and others with tweakable server-side spam protection) may get some extra relief from this tip on EmailDiscussions.com which creates a more sophisticated rule.

[Via Daring Fireball ]mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, email, bot-net, trojan

Adrian Sutton describes how he has set up SpamAssassin and Mail’s inbuilt Junk Filter to work together for extra spam-catching cleverness.

Having set up both SpamAssassin and Mail to dump their spam in Mail.app’s Junk folder, he runs SpamAssassin’s sa-learn script in a cron job so that it learns from what Mail’s Junk filter catches as well.

Running sa-learn –ham on Mail’s Inbox after returns false positives with Mail’s “Not Junk” button, helps SpamAssassin learn what’s not spam.

As a result, he has “a partially self-training system with a user-friendly interface”.mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk, tips, junk filter, self-training

Mail keeps a list of all the email addresses for people you have emailed.

It doesn’t discriminate. Even the ones you typed in incorrectly get stored and will pop up in Mail’s auto-complete drop-down menu for ever after. That’s annoying and it slows you down.

It’s Spring in Australia, so I’ve been spring cleaning Mail (See “Spring cleaning to regain disk space”).

Cleaning out the Previous Recipients list is part of the drill. It’s a good idea to do this from time to time, not only to clean out the duds, but also because:

1. Apple Mail’s Junk Filter will not mark an email as junk if it comes from an address in your Previous Recipients list. Along with the Address Book, it functions as a de facto “white list”. Keeping it up to date helps Mail to find junk better
2. It’s quite fun to go through the list and wonder who all these people are that you have emailed at least once.

You can find it under the Windows menu.

It presents you with a list of the names, email addresses and the date of the last email sent:

I cleaned out 53 addresses this time around. I’m not sure if it actually speeds Mail up, but it feels faster and the annoying mistakes no longer appear in the drop-down list for me to wade through. mail.app, apple mail, previous recipients, spring cleaning, productivity, tips, junk

Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention , Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).

She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:

When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.

This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.

By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.

[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]mail.app, apple mail, junk, tags, email, offline, to-do list, searching

Khoi Vinh has had enough . Although he is a long-time Entourage user and finds that the app is “a class act” that “frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer”, he’s dumped it. It was just too slow and the new Intel Mac version too far away.

He’s liking his new email client, Mail.app, a lot:

There may be a fantastic new iteration of Entourage in the works, but I need a fast, nimble and Intel-friendly email client today. So I’ve switched over entirely to Apple’s Mail; there’s just no arguing with its lightning fast search performance, its Mac OS X native fit and finish, and the fact that it’s available right now.

Of course, there are some things that he doesn’t like. The perfect email client is yet to appear. In particular Mail’s Smart Mailboxes don’t seem so smart to him.

But it has proved the right move. Most of all, he’s loving the improvement with IMAP accounts:

Mail is very responsive with IMAP, to the point where it’s a nearly seamless experience, more or less exactly how IMAP was intended to work. This allows me to move easily between work and home computers while keeping my mail database in sync, and without effort. Brilliant.

mail.app, apple mail, entourage, microsoft, imap, junk, switcher, email, smart mailboxes

Over the past few months, a number of people have noticed a sharp increase in spam in their .Mac accounts and have wondered why a premium service like .Mac doesn’t include server-side spam filtering.

Scott Murray has decided to do something about it. He has written an AppleScript that automates the reporting of spam to spam@mac.com and spam@uce.gov, the US Federal Trade Commission’s official spam-report mailbox.

Using this script, he hopes, will “let the .Mac team know about all this spam, so they can crank up the juice on their filters.”

Instructions for installing and using the script can be found on Scott’s web page .dotmac, .mac, spam, email, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, plugins, junk

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new type of spam that has been doing the rounds for the past few weeks.

This is not the “image spam” plague, but something else. Spammers are loading up inboxes with emails containing short extracts from authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Alexander Dumas and Daniel Defoe.

Sometimes called “empty spam” because it contains no advertising pitch or offers or phishing attempts, this type is on the rise according to IronPort Systems . I can’t find an IronPort press release to confirm the figures, but the WSJ says that,

the number of empty spam messages has almost doubled to 4% of all spam email in recent weeks, according to IronPort Systems…. For a few days in June, it peaked at 40% of all spam.

Theories about the motivation behind “empty spam” messages vary. Some suggest that it is an attempt to confuse spam filters so that more malicious spam will slip through later.

Others point to a possible breakdown of communication between spam host servers and the virus-infected “zombie” computers that circulate the spam more widely. When communication breaks down, the zombies continue to send the “hashbusting” text that helps spam make it past the filters but without the “active package” which contains the advertising offer or phishing scam.

Unlike “image spam”, I haven’t seen any of this “empty spam” myself.spam, junk, email, empty spam, image spam, tolkien, dumas, defoe, internet