h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

wtf is going on? I keep getting these 'bounced' messages where I've supposedly emailed someone asking to be their friend but it's bounced. If Windows live is what msn messenger used to be, I never signed up with my real email address, I used a hotmail address. I'm that old, you had to have hotmail to be able to use it!

So. WTF?


Subject:
[email protected] wants to be your friend on Windows Live
From:
[email protected]
Date:
21/01/2012 11:35
To:
[email protected]

[email protected] wants to be your friend on Windows Live

View invitation

Spam spam spam spam.

Spam spammity spam spam.

B

As a bounce notice?

The new thunderbird won't delete spam. marks it as spam and leaves it in the inbox. NO NO NO

*Absolutely* as a bounce notice; Good spam (from the originators point of view) is any spam that makes you look. Everybody opens failure notices to see who didn't get their email and why, so this spam is about as good as it gets for the spammer.

Other 'good' spamming messages include the ones with little or no subject text, for example 'hi' or 'no subject'. Again people are quite likely to open these because more genuine emails are likely to have these subject headings, than 'you've won $3 million!'. Using people's names also work well, even quite unusual ones; send out a million emails with 'Susan Day'* in the subject and guaranteed one in every few hundred recipients will know a person, so named...

p.s. do a virus check seen as you've probably now opened these messages...

*I fell for this the other week what are the chances I thought, of someone guessing I know a person with that name... eh quite high actually...

Check your setting under Tools -> Options -> Security -> Junk

That should have options for Thunderbird to move/delete spam.


Also check anything you may have set under Tools -> Account Settings -> (mail account) -> Junk Settings.

There might be something else lurking in there.

It's already got it set to move them to the junk folder. It's just being lazy.

Ah.

A couple of (possibly) useful links:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_messages_not_moved (though this looks rather old, possibly out of date)
<./>https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/155759</.> (in particular posts 4 and 13)

Aha, I changed it in the account settings instead of options, then followed the second set of instructions, so we'll see if that works. Thank you!

HTTPS links are working now?



TRiG.

Yes, that came back after a restart.

https links have always worked... if you know how to do them!

(use the < / . > and < . / > tags!)

ah, sorry I thought you were referring to me, although I was getting confused as I thought I'd asked the links problem on fb.