The Saturday 2005-05-14 at 07:40 +0200, Dr. Axel Krebs wrote:
Last weeks, I am experiencing mails from unknown people to my email-adresses. Sometimes two or three mails within a few seconds. These are accounts with T-Online, Ginko, Web.de. I looks as "they" knew all may emailadresses.
Welcome to the club: you are being spammed. I have also recently seen the same spam sent to several of my addresses, even some that I very seldom use, only in private. They may come within minutes or days. "They" are expert at getting email addresses from many sources. For example, one of your correspondents using windows may get a virus, and that virus sends lots of emails using the whole address-book. Or it may silently send his address-book to a spammer server somewhere. They can harvest addresses from any web site, mail-list, news server, whatever they can reach... And the may simply get a mail server host name, and launch a dictionary type attack, sending emails to all names it can guess that might exist on that server. If you make the error of bouncing an email, then they know that that address does exist... and you are a sitting duck in the middle of duck hunting season :-p
I'm asking myself, if there is a general(?) procedure how to get rid off these potential parasites?
Use anti spam filters, like spamassassin.
QUESTIONS: 1.) Is there a (simple?) way to deciffer... 1.a) who is doing what on my system,
No. Unless you are the unexistent internet police... If you have lots resources (ie, money, power, and influences), you can investigate, track, and perhaps, sue them. Chances are they are not in your same country. Or you can convince the politicians at many countries to take a real stance against spam... dreams are free.
1.b) how do they come there
I don't think you machine has been compromised. Those email accounts do not even reside on your machine, if I understood correctly your setup. The same as my email accounts.
2.) Does anybody know, how I can "clean" my system, in ideal case without changing Email-Adresses (printed an business cards).
Thereby, I mean: how can I reject unwanted mail?
Don't ever "reject", then you are busted. Simply throw them to the garbage.
A simple "How-To", Tutorial or so preferable.
3.) For future, I like to prevent from re-establishing those trash-mails again: how can I prevent unknown people from using "my adresse"?
Impossible :-/
3.a) My fear is, that my emails addresses "travel" uncontrolled. Is there a way to control? (I know, this seems to be naiv)
Impossible.
3.b) How can I reject unwanted mail?
Don't! Simply delete or move them. Never use "reject".
3.c) Do I need to create positive liste following the thought: who may send me an email (filtering)?
Some do. There is a method (commercial?) that requires you manually identify yourself the first time you email a particular business address. I forgot the name of the system.
A simple "How-To", Tutorial or so preferable for the above mentioned questions.
The spamassassin site should be a good starting point.
(P.S.: as I said: I am newbie)
I see ;-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson