For the last two months, I have been flooded with emails from someone wanting to sell me Norton Antivirus software. I’m not talking one or two a month. It’s at least two every day. And they are always from bogus email addresses that are never the same. Why is this? I expect this behavior from sites claiming to make me a millionaire in a week, but not from a legitimate company. Is Norton that desperate for my business that they will stoop to these tactics? Do they have a deal with AOL allowing this massive spamming? Has anyone else noticed this?
Boy, this burns my ass. I know I should just delete them with all the others, but the sheer volume of these damn things has put me over the edge. :mad:
Max: assuming you’re not using webmail, just write a mail filter – activated by a key phrase from the body (or subject-line, if it’s always the same) of the incoming mail – that will send all these directly to the trash.
I get those kinds of spam occasionally, and not just for Norton Antivirus, which leads me to think that Symantec – or any other legitimate software publisher – isn’t behind these messages. Rather, they’re probably from shady software resellers or (WAG here) bootleggers promoting their illegal copies of software for cheap.
More often, though, I get the regular spam – mortgage refinancing, get-rich-quick, hot teenage lesbo action, and the like.
Which reminds me – ya know how these messages will often tack on random digits or alphabets to bypass spam filters? I got one recently with the title “HUGE DICK . . . 1984” Heh, I suppose that’s what they mean by Big Brother!
I thought this was going to be a rant about how Norton Antivirus always pops up on Friday evenings. I keep forgetting to un-set that, and every week it pisses me off.
I didn’t know you could write a filter for AOL. I know you can block (or permit) email addresses, but a filter would do the trick. I’ll look around. In the meantime, if anyone knows how to do this in AOL, I’d be much obliged if you would clue me in.
Stink Fish Pot (quite a name you got there, btw): sorry if I suggested the impossible. I’m not an AOL user, so I have no idea what it’s limitations are. It never occurred to me that an email service you have to pay for would somehow not allow you to filter your mail. What’s up with that?
Mine comes up on my work PC every monday at noon, and slows the thing to a crawl for about 45min, and there’s no way to turn it off! Well, at least, I can’t find a way to turn it off. One time I seem to have hit a combination that made it go away, but discovering it again is like finding the freekin’ holy grail.
I always considered Nortan’s products to be right up there with the other viruses (virii?). Once that stuff installs itself on your system it’s almost impossible to remove, no matter how much you hate it. The damn stuff is like glue.
Mine starts up at work on Thursdays at 11:30 AM, which just happens to be when I leave for lunch. Usually it’s just finishing up by the time I get back, so I don’t have to deal with this much. At home of course I can set the time for the scan to take place, so I usually do this either overnight or before I leave for work.
OK… I’ve looked around on AOL, and I’ve yet to find a way to filter email by a keyword. Can anyone out there shed some light on this?
Stink Fish Pot (formerly Max)
Earthling hit the nail on the head. FWIW, I know for an absolute fact (can’t say how I know, but trust me, I know) that Symantec is not the source of these ads. In fact, they very rarely email standalone ads for their products - sometimes they may include a product blurb and price in a newsletter, but not too often.
Any reseller offering a current software title, be it Symantec, Microsoft, or Adobe, for more than 40% off the retail cost you’d see at Best Buy, is usually either misrepresenting something about the product (that it’s an upgrade-only price, or a trialware version), or is selling OEM software outside the vendor’s OEM restrictions. I’ve known people who have ordered dirt-cheap software, thinking they’re getting a full-box retail version, who get shipped an OEM sleeve with, like, a set of hard drive rails as the qualifying hardware - when most vendors require that their OEM titles be sold with full PC’s, or at least a hard drive.
Then, or course, there are the “resellers” who sell out-and-out pirated versions.
Have you tried asking the folks at Symantec about this? While I doubt they are the ones bombarding you with email, they might know something about it, and might be able to help you.
When you installed the Norton software, did you click or unclick any boxes that asked if you wanted to be notified of any news?
This could be a source of emails that are sent to you.
It might be useful for Norton to have the information that you are receiving so that they can protect themselves, and go after any illegal representations.
I use several Symantec products (Norton Antiviris and their firewall software, and I have never received email from them.
Oh hell, I’ll just say it. I work for Symantec. And even though I try not to wear my Symantec hat when I post, it really burns me to see those Spam emails advertising cut-rate products, most of which are non-compliant OEM products, or possibly even pirated, thus putting the consumer at risk. This has been a huge problem for most software vendors who do not yet use Digital Rights management, as Microsoft does with XP - whatever we may think of Microsoft, they don’t get pirated much since XP came out.
sunstone is right on the money . . . any vendor whose product you see advertised in a Spam email definitely wants to know about it; if you want to report something, go to the vendor’s website, and search for “piracy”. Symantec’s page on this topic is here. Most vendors have a similar page; they usually have guidelines for recognizing suspect offers, and an email address to report abuse to.
And Mods, if you deem the above link to be an endorsement of my company, please feel free to remove it.
Yes, I’m not a complete moo-ron. I c&p’d the url and went to community chats. I asked twice. And I waited an hour. Zippo.
I’m getting to think that AOL has no way of stopping emails based on keywords. I also think that AOL doesn’t mind the spam as much as they say. If they did, they would provide me more powerful tools to combat it.
sunstone and Crown Prince of Irony… thanks for the advice, but I feel that it would be a complete waste of time. I received 2 more messages today, and the return address (which is always different were:
It looks like it is just a bogus address, automatically generated by a spamming program. I’ve actually tried to reply to one of my billion received messages and it was kicked back as undeliverable.
And FWIW, I’ve never installed a Symantec product. (sorry CPoI)
