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GAH! It finally Happened! (email spam)

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,141
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I was hooping never to do this and it finally did to one poor, poor person.
I received an email from someone who saw one of my youtube videos and was asking for help. I gladly offered some documentation and a utility program and sent it back to him attached to the email, then went to bed.

So gmail at some point I can't recall stopped accepting zip and rar files for email attachments and when Outlook passed the email to gmail to deliver it did seem to go out on gmail's end, but gmail removed the offending attachment and bounced back to the mail client that there was an error. The mail client didn't fully parse the error. It just saw there was an error communicating with gmail, so it sent the email again...and again....and again....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again.....and again...........you get the idea.
So imagine my face this morning when I see Outlook has 1600 mail delivery errors and my gmail outbox is crammed solid with the same email going to the same poor sod.... Even while I was investigating it outlook sent it two more times. Finally I manually deleted it from Outlook's outbox (which still had it marked as unsent) and it shut up.


I shall never communicate with this person ever again. Oh, that was embarrassing........
 
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I've gotten in the habit of sending things with the wrong extension. Instead of things like .bin, I change it to .dat or something and tell the person getting it to change it back. The bot checkers will eventually get to the point that they will figure this trick and protect us from ourselves but for now, it seems to work.
Dwight
 
I have been using hotmail since 1996. Other than the interface gettings worse and worse, the service has remained mostly the same. I can send whatever.. However Alot of people I send to have restrictions on such files and I need to bend just to send them something so I know what you mean.. and its horribly stupid. I wont use Gmail for mail though, its godawful.
 
When I worked in web hosting for over a decade, Hotmail was undoubtedly the worst mail service ever. Good luck getting mail through if they decide they don't like your IP, and they lose more real mail to spam than anybody, I swear.

It was so bad in the 2000s that guys from MSFT at anti spam conferences introduced themselves as specifically working for "Microsoft, NOT HOTMAIL."

Say what you may about Gmail but at least it works and their spam filtering is essentially the gold standard.

Backscatter email sucks. Outlook and Mac Mail are about on the same level of suck too.

On a similar note I saw two help desk systems take each other out like this. The clients contact email was a help desk with an auto responder, which kept opening tickets that got acknowledged in an infinite loop. That one was fun.
 
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I opened two accounts. One in 1996, my primary, then one in 2002 or 2003 for online shopping. I find the newer one I opened has restrictions that my older one does not.. I dunno maybe I am grandfathered in. Anyway, I get no problems on my main account.


I find that people who have the Apple cloud email have all sorts of problems receiving any of my emails.
 
VERAULT said:
I have been using hotmail since 1996. Other than the interface gettings worse and worse, the service has remained mostly the same. I can send whatever.. However Alot of people I send to have restrictions on such files and I need to bend just to send them something so I know what you mean.. and its horribly stupid. I wont use Gmail for mail though, its godawful.
Click to expand...
Yahoo user since 2008 - and yes, the interface has likewise been getting more and more cluttered (and taking performance hits as a result) but fortunately they still offer the classic mail free from javas#!t.

Been recently considering switching to a new email provider for privacy reasons and the fact that my Yahoo address mostly only gets spam these days (hint: definitely NOT gFail or the iCrap cloud)
 
One of the many reasons I stopped using Outlook like 20 years ago, it's crap.

Won't send stuff properly, some little thing changes from an update or it doesn't like the security certificate and you spend hours in troubleshooting hell, only to call up your mail provider or MS support and they tell you "oh that's a known problem and there's no fix sorry."

I've never had any attachment restrictions on my gmail accounts, other than size. And even then, it'll automatically upload them to my cloud account to send them as linked attachments if I want it to.
 
I miss all the small isp emails.. or free web based emails of the late 90s early 2ks..

And for some reason it made me remember the first hi speed services. i remember when the phone company started offering DSL and the folks had the most unfortunate email suffix.. full.name@SBCglobal.DSL.net
 
I don't get this, I though that if the email bounces back to the sender as undeliverable it doesn't reach the recipient? So there were so many attempts to send the email but none succeeded? I probably understood something wrongly
 
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