E-Mail Trouble

Carol and Sharon,

I've looked at the forwarded e-mails that Sharon sent me, and I don't see anything to be too concerned about. These items all appear to be garden variety trash e-mails spawned by a virus infection, probably the Blaster Worm or one of its variants.

Carol, I don't think there's any reason to suspect a prankster at work. So I wouldn't expend much energy trying to report this to anyone. Remember, unless a Chandler Guild member has personally chosen to include his or her e-mail address in posts on this website, there are no Guild member e-mail addresses to balk harvest by spammers.

As viruses and worms get more sophisticated and insidious, it is getting very difficult to tell where they're coming from and how to stop them. Timlynn and I literally get several hundreds of these kinds of messages a week because of the high profile and numerous e-mail addresses that we have visible on the Internet. We simply delete them and don't give them another thought.

We live in a network society, that means that each of our address books can have hundreds of e-mail addresses, many of which are shared by a number of people who know each other. Such interconnections form a 'web' of cross-references that viruses and worms are designed to take advantage of.

When one person in this web of connection is infected by a virus or worm that uses e-mail spoofing of the 'to' and 'reply to' e-mail header fields, you can expect to be inundated with hundreds and hundreds of these infected e-mails until everyone in your circle of friends eradicates the virus at the same time.

Using your ISPs spam filter is important as well as using your e-mail client application's spam blockers. But no matter how effective these tools all are, you will still find crud in your in basket.

Since the Chandler Guild is a growing network of kindred spirits, is not surprising to learn that we are the subject of a virus bloom. Like it or not, we will have to get used to using the delete key and use safe e-mail practices. Don't open attachments from anybody unless you know the item is coming. Keep your operating system and your applications up-to-date with security patches. And whenever possible, access the Internet from behind a firewall preferably running in stealth mode.

And perhaps most importantly, don't let such unwanted intrusions into your in box take up any more of your time and energy that it takes to hit the delete key.

From the That's the Way the World Is Today Department,
-- Sohodojo Jim--

I didn't think that you could find the chandlers email addresses off this site. Could someone have picked up your business cards in CR, because I don't remember Sharon posting here for her info to be gotten from here. Because I checked and I've not gotten any of the emails that you two have. Not that I'm complaining. I have enough junk mail as it is. Just a thought. Am I that naive? or what?

Hello Sohodojo Jim , Do you want the E-mail addresses ? I have 5 new ones . I haven't deleted their addresses yet. I'm not sure how to send you a copy of the messages.

Hi Sharon,

You can just do a 'forward' in your e-mail client software and send one or more of these buggers to 'admin at chandlerguild.com' (massaging this into the regular e-mail address format, see NOTE/TIP below).

All I want to do at this point is help you identify what is going on. There is nothing we can do in terms of 'hunting these folks down' and making them stop it. If it is SPAM, then the ever-vigilant SPAM Cops are on their tail and they don't need the noise of us telling them what they already know. More likely, this sounds like a virus has hit someone you know and you are in the midst of a temporary 'bloom' of activity that will go away in a few days... providing folks in the original infectee's address book don't keep opening up and infecting each other.

NOTE/TIP: Although it is far from perfect, the technique of using a 'human readable' e-mail address in my comment above is one easy way for folks to share e-mail contact info without having that info 'harvested' by SPAMbots. Of course increasingly sophisticated SPAMbots can figure this out and harvest it anyway, but at least it keeps the 'dumb, brute force' harvesters at bay.

--Sohodojo Jim--

I sent three to you. Check out the address on the third. Looks like he might be the one responsibe. He also has an Iowa address. I think I deleted one of his messages yesterday.

But my internet provider has a spam protector, so they are not getting to my inbox. Is this the same type of thing you are getting? They've been coming to me for like a week. I just thought it was odd.

Jen