SPAM

[mhicks10]

Good grief! For someone who [has no idea what kind of SPAM tools Verizon is using] you sure are concerned with the 5 W's!

BLUF: I paid for a service of which I have not gotten 100% of, I spend more time remedying the issues than I do utilizing them and still, no one can tell me how within 30 minutes of my setting up my account I began getting SPAM.

You want to know the details ask your friends to check the call log, soemthing that every help desk must maintain in order to justify their existence. I am the customer, and by default right! I merely expect to get what I pay for and I KNOW I did not pay to teach myself the inner workings of the MyVerizon self help page

[Justin46]

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@mhicks10 wrote:

Good grief! For someone who [has no idea what kind of SPAM tools Verizon is using] you sure are concerned with the 5 W's!

BLUF: I paid for a service of which I have not gotten 100% of, I spend more time remedying the issues than I do utilizing them and still, no one can tell me how within 30 minutes of my setting up my account I began getting SPAM.

You want to know the details ask your friends to check the call log, soemthing that every help desk must maintain in order to justify their existence. I am the customer, and by default right! I merely expect to get what I pay for and I KNOW I did not pay to teach myself the inner workings of the MyVerizon self help page

1) I'm sorry, what are the "5 W's" you are referring to? And once again, why should I care what SPAM tool Verizon uses? (and I am serious, I have no clue why you think I should know or care)

2)  And I don't think anybody can tell you how you managed to get SPAM within 30 minutes - EVER. But my guess is that it is something you did, probably not on purpose, but still, something you did.

3) Who are the "your friends" you are referring to? I know a couple of retired Verizon employees, but as far as I know I don't know any who currently work for Verizon or any of their contractors, and certainly none who could provide information from the "call logs". And your "I am the customer, and by default right" statement? EVERYBODY is right some of the time, and EVERYBODY is wrong some of the time. In everything! For 20+ years part of my job was working on a "help desk", both voice and electronic, and I can state for an absolute fact that frequently the customer was wrong, way more than 50% of the time. And these were generally educated, knowledgeable, smart people.

So to summarize, I have no clue what you are talking about. And I really don't care any more,  I wish you luck in resolving your problem; in the meantime I will enjoy my SPAM-free email.

__________________________________
Justin
Verizon FiOS TV, Internet, and phone
QIP6416-P1, IMG 1.7.1, Build 09.97
Keller, TX 76248

[mhicks10]

 I as the lowly customer reserve every right to receive quality services rendered for payment tendered! Economics 101!

Did you ever stop to consider that perhaps you were not the only one with an I.T. or Helpdesk background; perhaps even some CEH? Whether you are right or not is utterly irrelevant actually. Because in short, it doesn't matter how much either one of us does or does not know. What matters is that I am paying for a service of which all problems with said service are my fault?! Yep, makes sense to me! **bleep**, **bleep** customer!

[ElizabethS]

Just a reminder folks, that this is a peer to peer support forum. We ask that you respect each other's opinions and positions, while expressing your own.

[Toobusy]

I have the same problem.  I get tons of spam a day.  I had 25 in the past 2 hrs. 

I have called Verizon and the person did a screen share with me.  Saw that all my settings were correct to catch spam and still, it comes and comes and comes.  I spend a good portion of my time on email, copying and pasting the full headers and forwarding them to not caught spam..but that does nothing.  The same spammer keeps forging headers (the isp is the same though) and starting all over again.  Does verizon block the sender or the isp??   ISP would be better because these spammers are forging their headers to look like it's coming from a different  user each time.

So, if Verizon made sure my settings were correct and all is "good", why do I continue to get tons and tons of spam every single day?   I have a FREE account with Yahoo and I would say they block 99.5% of all spam to my account..  I pay Verizon and they are blocking about 70% if that.   Makes no sense.  

I just get tired of my email account being jammed with trash.  I was told to copy and paste full headers and forward the spam to spamdetector.notcaught@verizon.net      I just wish it was worth my time to keep doing this. 

I have blocked senders which just means it goes into a different folder (Outlook Express) but it's still there.  I can report that same sender over and over and still it comes through.  Is there even anyone at this spamdector.notcaught thing???    Verizon customer service tech have no clue what to do other than make sure the spam settings are correct ..which they have verified that they are.

This has been my only complaint about Verizon.  It does me no good to even call again as I will get the same story, "let's go through your settings on screen share".  Then, they see the settings are correct and nothing happens.  The spam just keeps coming.   For the amount of money I pay for this service, I would think they could do a better job at blocking it than this.

[prisaz]

How to stop the spam? I too have the spam filter enabled. This goes right through. My Outlook finds it and puts it in the spam folder, why can't the Verizon filter block it?

Anyone have any ideas based on this image, and type of spam?

[topdog]

I have never had a single spam E-mail in my spam box.  In that regard, I find Verizon is doing a great job.  If you are having a problem, check your settings.  Mine is set to delete all spam.

[topdog]

Do you have your E mail settings to delete all spam?

[lasagna]

I recently commented on another thread about "how" an address seemingly get start receiving spam within minutes of creating.  It has nothing to do with the creation of the account, but instead with the prediction by spamming engines that a particular email address might exist.   The OP doesn't clarify what email address they chose, but I'm willing to wager it's not a seemingly random series of letters and numbers.  I suspect if it were, the results would be different.

With that said ... on to prisaz's example ... do you have the spam filter ON the MyVerizon portal set to discard spam or just move it to a folder?   Remember that the client on your PC just picks up mail from the server and then can process it -- so, any changes made on the client itself have absolutely no impact on the upstream spam filtering engine.  The reason I ask about move vs discard is that since the pickup mechanism from Verizon is POP and not IMAP, the POP agent could very well be ignoring the spam folder structure and just bringing down all items.    If you are just moving, then I would suggest changing to delete them instead (on MyVerizon, not on the mail client) to see if the results are different.

I don't know which service Verizon uses to do spam filtering, but it does a less than admirable job compared to some of the leading spam engines -- message labs, ironport, etc. all do a pretty good job and I've seen a 95% discard rate with no reported false positives in an enterprise setting with these solutions.   Some spam does slip thru, but it is minimal and over time it gets caught as well. 

Personally, I don't use Verizon's webmail for my mail client.  Instead, I use a Gmail account and configure the POP polling feature to pull the mail over into my Gmail mailbox where their spam engine nabs any spam and puts it in the spam folder.  So far, 100% on Verizon mail -- although I'll admit I get very very little mail in this account and almost no spam even though my email address is one I would consider easy to figure out using published name databases.

Anyone involved with email knows how difficult it is to tag and toss spam without getting any false positives and likewise understands that even if Verizon were doing the unthinkable of selling individuals addresses, that it would take more than "a few seconds" for spam engines to pickup and find that address and begin to use it.

[Keyboards]

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@lasagna wrote:

With that said ... on to prisaz's example ... do you have the spam filter ON the MyVerizon portal set to discard spam or just move it to a folder?   Remember that the client on your PC just picks up mail from the server and then can process it -- so, any changes made on the client itself have absolutely no impact on the upstream spam filtering engine.  The reason I ask about move vs discard is that since the pickup mechanism from Verizon is POP and not IMAP, the POP agent could very well be ignoring the spam folder structure and just bringing down all items.    If you are just moving, then I would suggest changing to delete them instead (on MyVerizon, not on the mail client) to see if the results are different.

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I have had Verizon's spam filter on and set to move to the spam folder for years and my local client (Outlook or Outlook Express) only retrieves the emails in my inbox.  I use the move option because occasionally the spam filter grabs a non-spam email (even after I have added the sender to my "whitelist").