I have recently been getting a LOT of emails like the one below. If anyone has been getting them, I do hope you're ignoring them.
Dear Goofball Member,
Your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of unsolicited spam messages during the recent week. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and confirm the attached document so you will not run into any future problems with the online service.
If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to cancel your membership.
Virtually yours,
The Goofball Support Team
+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Goofball Antivirus - www.goofball.com
account-info.zip
Of course, this email did not come from "The Goofball Support Team". And yes the attached file almost certainly will unlease a nasty virus on my PC should I be foolish enough to save the file, unzip it, and execute whatever is inside. I'm also well aware of how the spammers in question here faked (or spoofed) the "from" address. And this is why it got by my spam filter, since I have it set up to accept any messages from "goofball.com", as it is very import I receive all of the emails the system generates for me every day.
I guess it just never ceases to amaze me the depths at which people will go to screw other (unknowing and innocent) people over in life. The internet is very much a microcosm of the world itself. And this kind of behavior is representative of the kinds of lowlifes in the world who are just waiting for you to fall asleep on the subway with your wallet sticking out, leave your car door unlocked, or turn your back in the grocery store with your handbag in your shopping cart.
I suppose in every ecosystem there has to be the bottom feeders, the parasites - those who cannot create or generate any resources of their own, so they are relegated to living off the remains of what others discard or do not guard carefully enough. So I suppose I really should feel sorry for spammers, since their living depends on their ability to get people to look at things they really don't want to. Virus writers deserve my sympathy too. They are usually complete social rejects looking for attention. "Everyone look at what I can do!". Pathetic, really.
Some time ago, I used to receive a river of spam the size of the Mississippi. My email address, "jskills AT goofball.com", has been around a very long time, and yes I did unknowing use it in many places I shouldn't have back in the day. So I became a huge spam target. I began to consider giving up my email address and changing it to a new one. But being a semi-obsessive compulsive person, not to mention almost as stubborn as Robnoxious, I decided to go a different way. I would write my own custom spam filtering application. The idea being that it could be used to receive email from any email address and filter the spam out of it and allow the user a web based interface or a traditional POP3 connection (used by mail clients like Outlook Express, Mozilla, etc.)
So, Snaremail was born. Why "Snaremail"? The idea was that you could "snare" you real mail out of a river of spam. All your mail would be fetched remotely from your mail server and filtered on the Snaremail server. The mail could either be downloaded or viewed from there. The filtering works in a number of ways:
We use the extremely efficient Spam Assassin technology to detect and spam. The nice part about this is that it actually "learns" more about spam the more it is used.
Vipul's Razor is used so that alll mail is compared in real-time to a giant database of existing spam and if it matches, it's filtered.
There is a huge collection of IP addresses for machines identified as being spammers called the Realtime Black Hole List (RBL). All mail from these IPs are rejected. This filter can be too strong (it actually had goofball.com listed as a spammer at one point).
Custom rules can be defined by the user at any time. For example, if the subject has the word "viagra" or "penis" in it, automatically reject it. Rules can also be set up to always accept mail from a specific person or for a specific subject.
Address book whitelisting is used so that mail is always accepted from anyone in your Snaremail address book. You can populate this address book by uploading an Outlook address book file or just let the address book be populated automatically with each person you send mail to.
These are just some of the features I tried to build into this system. It's been working really well for me for some time now. I'm filtering hundreds of spam messages per day, which go into a "rejects" folder, which is useful in case something gets accidentally filtered. There are a group of people using it now who are all pretty happy, including my Mom! If your Mom can use something on the computer, it's probably designed decently enough right? We offer Snaremail for a month for free. It has a web based interface, so you could receive your mail from any PC, which is very useful when travelling or when you're at work since everything is done over a secure connection (yes your IT department at your job does monitor everything they can, except what goes over a secure server).
People have been asking why there's been no new development on Goofball lately. Part of the reason for that is that we're just not sure what more we can add, but another big reason is that I've spent quite a great deal of time working on Snaremail. It was a big and fairly complicated project that just had to be done right. We turned it live on the public earlier this year, but unfortunately a few days after we did, Google released their gargantuan mail product, Gmail. Gmail has a decent interface, good spam filtering (although not as customizable as Snaremail), but does not allow you to pick up mail from an existing account as far as I know. What they do offer, which is amazing, is a full GB of storage space. Wow. Hey everyone, here's a free small hard drive for you.
So if you're interested, do feel free to check out Snaremail. And in the meantime, watch out for those nasty emails ...
Why not join the rest of us on the inside and get all of Goofball.com?
