Heaps of spam emails

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k1w1k1d

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#279543 21-Oct-2020 22:23

The IT Department at work gives us a heads up every couple of days to advise on spam emails etc to be aware of.

We also now have a banner across the top of all emails received from outside the company advising us to be careful about clicking on links etc.

They also tell us how many emails the company receives each week and how many are rejected as spam, containing viruses, etc.

Last week we received 27,000 emails. Just over 9,000 were rejected. That's over a third of all the emails we receive!

I guess most companies will be having similar experiences with junk emails?

gehenna

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#2590073 21-Oct-2020 22:26

Depends what you define as received, and where the blocking takes place.

Linux

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#2590077 21-Oct-2020 22:35

Only a 3rd so not much at all

1101

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#2590151 22-Oct-2020 10:32

k1w1k1d:

Last week we received 27,000 emails. Just over 9,000 were rejected. That's over a third of all the emails we receive!

And then you get the staff member complaining about the 1 or 2 that got through to them (true)
:-)

xpd

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#2590152 22-Oct-2020 10:36

Yup, and will get worse leading up to Xmas.....

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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#2590196 22-Oct-2020 12:48

I used to look after our in house mail server several years ago.
It was actually pretty frightening to look into the log files and see the continuous avalanche of crud that was trying to come in.

I have seen it reported that a bit over 50% of all worldwide email is spam - sounds about right....

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

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#2590198 22-Oct-2020 12:51

Surprised it's only 50%

xpd

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#2590223 22-Oct-2020 14:01

I was running my own server for a few years from home, and yeah, the number of hits (just bots, etc trying to log in) was incredible, was IP blocks all over the place, let alone the actual spam trying to come in as well (SpamAssassin FTW).

I'd probably estimate legit emails were probably about 30% of the daily total.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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fe31nz

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#2590499 23-Oct-2020 01:25

I run my own home SMTP server and since I have a low volume of legitimate email, I think I probably get > 90% spam. A fair chunk of it is pretty obvious and can be blocked by very basic measures such as checking the HELO/EHLO message address is actually in a valid format. If it says "USER", it is spam! But as I do not subscribe to any blocking service, I have built up a huge list of blocked IP addresses, server names and email addresses over the years. Mostly I can just block at the SMTP server, but there are some nasty spammers out there that I have to block in my router firewall as if they have any indication that there is a SMTP server present they will keep on doing lots of traffic to try and crack it. I have all the address blocks of one small Italian ISP blocked in my router as I got so much traffic from there it was overloading my logs. I suspect from the details I was able to find out about that ISP from whois that it has been bought by some Russian hacker group.

I had a good laugh a couple of months ago when I noticed I was getting spams from an address that was "spamer@...". They actually identified themselves as spammers! And clearly were not native English speakers.