500 unwanted messages (tech TV) received

Hi All: When I got home last night late after my son's baseball game I opened Outlook Express to look for an expected email from my brother. Much to my surprise, messages started pouring in to my inbox by the hundreds.

Each from a different email address, with the subject line being "[techTV] "plus either "subscribe ", "unsubscrtibe ", "drop dead ", "go to hell" or some four letter expletives.

I opened one of the messages and saw the following: "Please unsubscribe me as I have received 500 messages and can't use my email." This is a copy of one of the message bodies:
_________________________________________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: Crabtree, Mike
To: TechTV Listserv (E-mail)
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 7:39 AM
Subject: [techtv] Unsubscribe


Please remove me from this list.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
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Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/ZFfwlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->

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_______________________________________________________________
And another message body:
________________________________________________________________
Keith.....
Please do not consider this junk mail. Will you help me? I am getting tons
on junk mail all wanting to be removed from techtv. How did they get my
e-mail address? What can I do to stop this?
Thanks for you help, by the way what is a mailbomb?
________________________________________________________________
It has the same links etc.

This morning the messages continue.

ISP says change email address, prefer not to.

Anybody know what is going on here? Would appreciate some help.

Martin

 

Haven't got a clue but it sounds like you've become a pretty popular guy - hey with friends like this ............ OK, so what are you going to do? For starters, set up a mail filter to dump any incoming mail with a tech tv subject line. Then download the latest (V 1.3) Spybot and run it, follow up with Adaware. Then run an online virus scan. Then run Hijack this and post the log to Security forum and give them an idea of what happened and what you have done so far. Once they have you squared away, download and buy Mailwasher ($30) after 30 day free trail - a "must have" application. Good Luck.

 

Wow, Catastrophy is carrying on with a TV set, now? The lady gets around more than my husband's ex-wife!

Your ISP could be more helpful with this situation. I'd call them back. You are almost certainly not the only victim of the mailbomb in their network. Glad you didn't fall for the "change email addy" routine. People are so LAZY!

Johanna

 

Hi Johanna: Called ISP again, they say Yahoo Groups at fault, nothing can be done except by Yahoo. I set email filter in outlook express, downloaded 15 more and filter deleted them as they came in. What a waste of resources.

I'm going to go to Yahoo and see if they have some tech support I can complain to.

I did that no GUI thing you suggested, dont like that, like the little green stuff, subliminal or no, plus, when doing boot scan for file system errors w/o gui, don't get graphics of progress, don't like that either. Gonna leave it alone.

Martin

 

I belong to a few leatherworking Yahoo Groups, and Moderate 3 others, and Yahoo tech support is about a half step above useless. They do, however, have the power and motivation to stop this kind of thing.

If you belong to any YahooGroups, unsubscribe, read your messages from the site for a day or so, then resubscribe. I wouldn't take any of it personally, either. There is an infection somewhere, and your email addy was in the harvest. If you have anything to do with Yahoo, that kind of thing happens.

Email Yahoo, but chances are they'll have corrected it before they respond to you. You'll get a polite form letter that is totally irrelevant to your situation, but meant to sound personal and warm. I think the staff at Yahoo is made up of Borg, but I have no proof.

Johanna

 

Thanks Johanna: I went to their site, you are right about useless tech support, but I did post to their feedback, maybe they'll read it.

Martin