Questions tagged [spam]

DO NOT USE THIS TAG ON QUESTIONS THAT ARE SPAM, we have a special flag for that! Questions about bypassing somebody else's spam filter are also not welcome. And keep in mind that this is a programming Q&A site, not a general computer support site. Spam is the use/abuse of electronic messaging systems (e.g. e-mail) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.

This tag would be appropriate for programming questions about spam classification, etc.

We do not control the email filters of Gmail, Hotmail, etc. If you want to learn how to bypass them, ask the people who maintain those filters instead (but be very much prepared for "are you serious?" replies, or, most likely, no reply at all).

Understand that spammers read this site and so divulging methods for bypassing somebody's spam filters is comparable to sabotage. Please do not post such solutions.

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Reliably detecting PhantomJS-based spam bots

Is there any way to consistently detect PhantomJS/CasperJS? I've been dealing with a spat of malicious spambots built with it and have been able to mostly block them based on certain behaviours, but I'm curious if there's a rock-solid way to know if…
Terrakin
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Google Analytics - What is "Vitaly rules google ☆*:.。...)ノʕ•̫͡•ʔᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ(=^. .^=)oO"?

I was checking my Google Analytics Realtime Overview and I found the following. Is it harmful to my site? Should I take any precautions?
New to Rails
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Protecting email addresses from spam bots / web crawlers

How do you prevent emails being gathered from web pages by email spiders? Does mailto: linking them increase the likelihood of them being picked up? Is URL-encoding useful? Obviously the best counter-measure is to only show email addresses to…
Zaz
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Strategies to prevent email scanners from activating "unsubscribe" links

I'd like to provide a single-click "Unsubscribe" links in the footer of the emails my service sends. Obviously, many spam scanners will scan emails, and will follow any links found in the emails to scan their contents for malware. A workaround I…
Pēteris Caune
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Bypass Gmail's spam filter (mails sent with PHP from a shared host)

TL;DR: Mails sent from shared hosting (such as a cheap domain from Unoeuro or One.com) end up in spam. How to fix? I made a mail-system, that first generated a PDF-file (using FPDF), whereafter it sent the PDF-file as an attachment with PHP's…
Zeth
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Decrypt obfuscated perl script

Had some spam issues on my server and, after finding out and removing some Perl and PHP scripts I'm down to checking what they really do, although I'm a senior PHP programmer I have little experience with Perl, can anyone give me a hand with the…
The Coder
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How to configure AWS ELB to block certain IP addresses? (known spammers)

I am looking for a way to drop connections from known spam ip addresses on an Amazon's Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)? I am currently doing this at the web server level (multiple instances, running behind the ELB), but wondering if there is a way to do…
Litmus
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How can I lower the spam score of my email message?

I am sending a new logon and password to a user, however when I do on a test version of our site on the internet the Spam score is 4.6 by spam assassin. Which means it gets trapped. The Email is HTML (so the marketing dept have their nice fonts and…
Phil Hannent
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Online SpamAssassin evaluation / RFC conformant check

I want to check the SpamAssassin SPAM score of E-Mails including headers generated by a script from a WebApp. Therefore I need to run this mail through SpamAssassin to get the specific SPAM headers like: Yes, score=6.032 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_24=1.282…
Stefan Profanter
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SPF issue: what causes softfail?

Whenever I use PHP to send emails to members of my site, the email ends up in the spam folder for most email providers like Gmail and Hotmail. When I check the original source in Gmail, I see the following: Delivered-To: mypersonalmail@gmail.com …
Rick
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What are some ways to protect emails on websites from spambots?

I'm creating a public internet facing website which contains the email address of their salespeople. What kind of programming options do I have to generate the "mailto" and display the email from that address but limit the spambots from picking…
danmine
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How can the Return-Path header be different than the actual email bounce recipient?

I recently moved my transactional email sending to Mailgun It works good so far however I am wondering about the return-path header. Consider this email (I removed irrelevant header and replaced email/domain for privacy purposes) Delivered-To:…
The Surrican
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PHP: Anti-Flood/Spam system

I'm actually working on a PHP project that will feature a user system (Login,Register,Send lost password to email,..) and I think that this may be very vulnerable to Brute-Force attacks and/or Spam (Send a password to someone's email like 1000…
lamas
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Got hacked! What does this PHP code do? And how should I avoid?

I was hacked, and apparently they were sending spam emails. There were two files that they injected into my server (that were duplicated across all sub-directories). One is a heavily hashed PHP file that may be the sender. The code below is from…
idealizm
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Prevent MediaWiki from being spammed

My MediaWiki site is currently under the spammers attack. I get around 10 spam pages registered daily. What I've I already done: Only users with confirmed emails can create/edit pages. ReCAPTCHA widget. Captcha displayed on the actions: 'edit'…
Mr. Pumpkin
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