We have to deal with SPAMMERS that spam our forum, and scammers that try to get you to take fake checks for items that you sell of the very successful Oz Report classified ads. A classified ad user recently reported such an attempt. Gerry wrote:

Yeah, there's a whole lot of spammers and scammers out there. I'm thinking of putting up a public page that lists all the ones we've banned already, expose their emails on purpose, maybe they'll get heavily spammed in return!

Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, the email you got looks like the standard first step for the old Nigerian scam, though it could just be an attempt at harvesting emails (they can't get your email from the Oz Report site, but would if you replied to them).

There were thrity seven emails sent through our emailer from that IP address, within a half-hour. All the same length, so most likely the exact same form letter to everyone. It's banned now so he can't do it again (or access anything on the server), not from that IP anyway. Unfortunately, I don't get an indication that they are spammers until after they've already sent a pile of them.

Hmmm, more coding and I might be able to do something about it. Defer the sending to the recipient until a confirmation link sent to their "from" email is activated, for one. Right now the email is sent right away, nice and simple. Deferring it would require storing it until later when the confirmation link is used. Unless all the info is encrypted into the link, but that would limit the length of them, maybe close to the lengths that are actually used. 'Couse, if they are stored & deferred, that would also open the possibility of seeing if too many end up coming from the same place too quickly. Future refinements, we'll do what we can.

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