Tattle on sender of Intel/MS AOL/Intel Merger Email 1

[vsamudio]

How would you all feel if in your abuse or admin mailbox you would get an email from me tattle-tailing on one of your workers in your business???

Along with all the spam , I've also gotten several feel good/get rich/Applebees, emails . One is the scam that says Microsoft is planning a merger with Intel or AOL. and they want you to forward the email and you will get money back from Bill Gates.HA!!
I replied to one person who is a principal at a local ISD and CC Abuse@hisISD and the local paper and told him not to use my tax money for non-business emails and that he was dumb to think he was getting any money.
Is it okay to start doing this. If its a Govt office especially.

Personnally if you all did it to one of my peoples I would gladly forward to the person's manager and HR with a note to follow up with me on what kind of disiplinary action was taken.

Vic D Scrooge

 

[SGTRawlins]

Can you confirm that the government office was the true source of the e-mail you recieved?

It may have been a ghost address in which case you just sent an abusive/confrontational e-mail for no reason!

Be carefull this may be in breach of a communications rights act.

 

[ChrisHunt]

Like all spam, it's best to ignore such messages.

As SGTRawlins points out, the "From:" email address may be spoofed by the real sender - so the person you think sent the message would have had nothing to do with it. Alternatively, if the person in question is known to you, they may have fallen victim to one of those viruses that sends messages to everyone in their address book.

Either way, it's not a case to start writing to papers and HR departments about.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[vsamudio]

It seems all we can do is ignore Spam. But this was a message that's been fowarded several times,with users putting in diffrent comments along the way, with a whole bunch of emails adresses on in it from previos forwards.
It felt good to reply when there's a chance to stop it or at least slow it down.
but
I can see where you all are comming from.
It might be a worm sending out the emails in that persons name.
Notifing a newspaper was an extreme even if it was not a worm .
But
How about notifing the administrator that "I got this email from your system, can you please check it out . make sure you have no worms or virus on your user's PC"
or something to that affect?????????????????

 

[lionelhill]

no, no, please don't send the administrator or anyone this thing asking if they've got any worms. It's 99.999% certain that the person who has the worm in the first place is nothing to do with the name in the "from" field. If it's reached the stage of having bits added and been sent on by a human then it's made the jump from spam-hood to circular-letter-hood. If there's anything sadder than computers spamming us for no reason, it's our friends spamming us because they're too gullible to recognise a spam when they see one (next step: the non-virus chain letters where your best friend tells you you MUST delete a file called vitalbit.dll because it is a virus, and then they write back and tell you it's not a virus after all, just after you've deleted it, forwarded the mail to 10 of your best friends, and then found it was a vital bit of Windows....).

Incidentally, anyone know why someone wants me to sell them at least 500,000 tonnes of railway lines? I still can't work out quite where the catch is in that one. If I happened to have that much railway stashed away.

 

[CajunCenturion]

Obviously lionelhill, to keep you on the right track.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[lionelhill]

ha bloomin ha. You've cheered up my lunchbreak...

 

[SGTRawlins]

If the e-mails you are recieving are genuine, intended forwards from the sender then contact tem was probably the right thing to do, if the problem persists then contacting the system admin may not be such a bad idea.

They may be intrested to know that there users are contributing to chain mail, this is no doubt in breach of there user policy.

I know that in the UK it is illegal to forward an e-mail without expressed written consent of the originator.

 

[Dollie]

For one, my users are smart enough to recognize scams, chain letters, hoaxes and viral content. Even if they weren't, as an admin I don't need my mailbox filled up with complaints about e-mail content UNLESS my users are spamming them in one fashion or another. Breaking out the big guns for a gnat appears to be blowing things out of proportion.

Second, if my e-mail address was on a puter that's infected by a virus and was forged into the Sender portion, and you send a snappy reply about wasting your time and money, you (and your mail admin) will probably receive an answer you won't want to read along with a /24 block.

Chain letters are usually forwarded by friends, co-workers, family, associates. Tell your friends to forget you're their friend when they receive an e-mail that says "forward this to all your friends!". Bookmark some good hoax sites such as snopes or urbanlegends, send these sites to your friends to help educate them so the silliness will stop. (This works, believe me.) It's much easier than getting your blood pressure up over them, and you're probably receiving fewer hoaxes than spam anyway.


Report the spam responsibly, and give your friends and associates a break instead of trying to get them fired.






I'm not an MCSE, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.

 

[KornGeek]

Dollie,
I used to email links to urbanlegends whenever I got one of these chain letters. I would sometimes include detailed arguments about how it's not technologically possible. I would even use the Reply To All feature to spread knowledge/embarassment in an effort to prevent these.

The only technique that worked in the end was good old-fashioned ridicule. When I get those messages, I simply delete them, and next time I talk to the person, I tease them asking how they're spending their earnings, etc. Sometimes the old methods work the best.


I agree that these emails are annoying, but reporting it as abuse seems to me to be going too far. Think of it this way. Some poor naive person thought there was an easy way to make money, and they wanted to include you as well. It seems their intentions were good at least.

 

[Dollie]

Ridicule always works, except for the densest (such as my sister). The PT Barnum crowd (a sucker born every minute) won't stop sending these e-mails, and to those people I just say "I can't receive personal e-mail at work" and give them my junk e-mail address that deletes everything received every two weeks. No worries.

I still can't figure out the chain letter from the principal that the original poster mentioned. I've never heard of a chain letter with a spoofed sender. Anyone else heard of this?

 

[ESquared]

An employee at one large facility I worked at forwarded a bogus virus warning to everyone at the entire facility. I wonder how many people picked up on the warning's nature, given that it talked about the "Deeyenda Maddick" virus. Think about it.

I emailed her back with an explanation of what she'd missed and suggested she check with the IT department before sending out future virus warnings.

Sometimes, just exposing a person's idiocy is enough to curtail it.

 

[LTeeple]

I bet her face was red when she read the explanation!!


Cheers!
Laura

 

[Albion]

I replied to one person who is a principal at a local ISD and CC Abuse@hisISD and the local paper and told him not to use my tax money for non-business emails and that he was dumb to think he was getting any money.

This is your mistake, it's VERY unprofessional to blatently call someone dumb. Not only have you stooped to this persons level but you've made your company look bad in the process. Your response should have been more like "This is a known hoax, please refrain from sending these to me in the future." with a link to it's description on hoaxbusters or vmyth.

 

[CasperTFG]

I have done the expose and ridicule with reply all in the past. It's a good thing to do if you never want to talk to that person again. Just try and not do it to your wife, the couch isn't as comfy as it looks.



Casper

There is room for all of gods creatures, "Right Beside the Mashed Potatoes".

 

[DoubleD]

Just try and not do it to your wife, the couch isn't as comfy as it looks.

hehehe


Pain is stress leaving the body.

DoubleD