I do not get many spam messages on my main e-mail account but over the last week or so I have received eight from a company called ATGWS trying to sell me expensive watches. Each time I bounce this e-mail on to Spamcop and block the sender but I still get new ones from a different sender . Has anyone else been getting this spam ?. The strange thing is that they are selling Rolex watches "crafted in Italy " . I thought that the Rolexes were made in Switzerland. One thing I have not done is told ATGWS to take me off their mailing list because I know that this just tells them that I am reading the spam.
If you’re reading the spam that’s telling them that your reading the spam, 99% of the time.
(Spammers use ‘bugs’ – a dummy image tag in the body of the message, like <IMG SRC=“suckerlog/rayneman@server.msg736482364” HEIGHT=“1” WIDTH=“1”>)
There’s no image with that name, so it’s invisible, but the filename is uniquely connected to the spam you just opened. Spammer has a script that checks the log files and says, “Message #736482364 was opened and read – rayneman@server.com is a likely target – put him at the top of the list.”
If you want to keep the spam from mulitplying – turn off the preview window and never open anything that appears to be spam. The preview window is the spammers’ best friend.
If spam becomes problematic for you, and you use Windows + have a regular POP3 email account, I recommend installing the Spam Assassin Proxy. (Free download at the very bottom of the page.)
It’s highly configurable, and one of the benefits is that stuff marked as spam gets “encapsulated” and then moved to a designated spam folder. The spam itself becomes an optionally-opened attachment, and the body of the message contains a statistical report about exactly why the message has been pegged as spam, so you can ascertain what it’s about without showing your cards to the enemy.