Lately, most of the spam that sneaks its way through Yahoo’s spam filters is in Russian. (Darn you, Sasha, for sending me that cute thank-you note from the Russian greeting card site!) I keep reporting it to Yahoo and deleting it, but so far all that seems to accomplish is making it breed like little pan-Slavic paramecia. Ironically, most of it is ads for mass e-mailing advertising services…
How can I make it stop? Yahoo must not have any foreign-language speakers, or maybe the Russian spammers are just craftier at making their way past the spam blockers…
I warn everybody that the best way to lose my friendship is to send me an e-greeting card because those places are just harvesting email addresses for spam.
Yahoo webmail user here. I don’t know if this’ll be much help; it depends on the contents of the email. You could filter all emails whose from address ends “.ru” using Yahoo mail’s filters to put such messages straight into the trash bucket. If they don’t end in “.ru”, then there’s not a lot you can do. (I devote a lot of time to setting up filters to block certain classes of message, e.g. “Viagra” in the subject line, but it’s constantly varying.)
Other than that, just keep reporting it; Yahoo claims to block mail from gateways/mail servers which are commonly used by spammers.
Try replying and tell them you don’t speak Russian. I was getting spam in Swedish and did that as politely as possible and received an apology and a promise to take me off the list. So far, the promise has been kept.
I actually have one person who submitted a link to me for my CJ2A page. I haven’t received any mail from him since I linked his page (which I find ver interesting, since it’s about Jeeps in Russia), but I’d hate to block him.
One thing I noticed is that Russian characters don’t show up in the e-mail title. Instead, they show up as Roman characters with tildes, carrots, and other accent marks in them. I’ve set up my (Earthlink/Netcom) filter to look for a couple of these characters in the message title. That way I can filter spam, but still get legitimate e-mails from Russia. (Of course, I might be filtering out legitimate Russian e-mails; but if they want to talk about Jeeps they’ll have to use Roman characters.)
Dunno if this is the kind of greeting card you are getting, but there is more to some of them than just a “hi.” This particular one, if the attachment is opened, will infect you with a keystroke logger and more, with all data forwarded to the sender.
My dad is having a related problem - he is getting tons of virus-generated e-mails every day in his yahoo account, which he is using as his primary e-mail account. Unfortunately, Yahoo only provides capability for moving things to the trash - which still counts against your space requirement!
He gets such a massive amount of junk every day (this only started recently), that if he doesn’t delete the crap once every day or two, he hits his space cap and thus can’t get legitimate e-mails.
If you use popmail, I recommend downloading spampal, a freeware app that sits between your mail client and mailserver. I installed it yesterday, and so far it’s caught 99% of all spam sent to my account.
I do speak Russian, and I do have friends and others in Russia from whom I want to be able to receive e-mail. So I definitely don’t want to block either Cyrillic text or the .ru domain.
Most of the spam isn’t coming from addresses using the .ru domain, anyway. A disproportionate amount seems to be coming from Germany and Finland, and some is even coming from U.S.-based .edu addresses. Crafty little buggers!
Yes, I do have a couple of Russian exes, but they departed of their own accord (the one who was still in Russia last I heard definitely left of his own accord, and I haven’t heard from him in more than 10 years, anyway). They had their issues, but generally not issues of the type that would lead me to believe that they are stalking me.
Free email forwarding with the best anti-spam filters anywhere is available at www.despammed.com
I’ve been using this service for several months, and I am very impressed with it. Whenever I must provide an email address in a situation which I suspect spam may result, I use my me*@despammed.com addy. Legit email gets forwarded to me.
OK, this is getting really silly. I just got a spam message from the American English Center in Moscow, inviting me to come and improve my English. Go figure.