The DEN & Spam

["Jim Clauson, Breakthrough Systems" <jim@jclauson.com>]

Depending on your mail handlers - the DEN may or may not have been quiet 
the last few weeks.

I have intentionally processed no messages, though some of you have been 
receiving apparent messages from the DEN.

Part of our commitment to list quality since day one has been that no 
message can make it to the subscriber list without being reviewed.  One 
aspect of this is that SPAM *cannot* be relayed through the DEN.  SPAM is 
deleted before I even open subscriber messages for review.  When I logged 
on tonite, I deleted 419 spam messages - leaving 22 actual messages to be 
reviewed!

If you have received messages that appeared to come from the DEN in the 
last 2+ weeks - they have been spam or from a spoofed address (a spoofed 
address is where a spammer uses a valid address to cloak the spammer's 
actual sending address).  I suspect that 1 or more subscribers on the DEN 
have problem with their mail handler caused by some form of malware.

I highly encourage everyone to get some form of malware scanner for their 
mail handler.  I know that many of you are using commercial products like 
Norton, Symantec, or other internet security software.  If these are out of 
reach for you, consider a free scanner like AVG from http://www.grisoft.com/

If you receive a spam that has apparently come to you from the DEN - please 
forward it to me with complete headers (all the routing and addressing text 
at the top of the message that usually means nothing to you) - so perhaps 
we can get to the source of the problem.  Please send these to jim@jclauson.com.

With everyone's help, we can solve this issue and get the list smooth again.

Thanks,

jc



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Jim Clauson --------------------- jim@jclauson.com
Deming Community Webmaster
Breakthrough Systems ----- http://jclauson.com
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