# Has Anyone Noticed An Increase in SPAM From .top Domains?



## colchar (May 22, 2010)

Has anyone else noticed an increase lately in SPAM from .top domains?

It has become a major pain in the ass as I am receiving 15-20 SPAM emails from those domains daily. My filters catch many of them but not all. I have tried to create a Gmail filter for anything with the .top extension but that doesn't work. All of the emails contain a link through which you can allegedly unsubscribe but I am not buying it as I read in the news a while back that doing so often increases SPAM as it shows the spammers that they have hit a legitimate email address. They also include US mailing addresses but I highly doubt those are legitimate because, so far as I know, the US has anti-spam legislation. If the addresses were legit it might be worth reporting them but, as I said, I highly doubt that they are.

These piece of shit spammers are becoming a major pain in the ass. I would love to see a group like Anonymous take them on and really fuck them over.


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## Guitar101 (Jan 19, 2011)

It started today. Received 12 with many from one place. I just put them on my spam filter but I'm curious as to why they do it. I never ever open any and I'm pretty sure no one does either so what's the advantage to the spammers.


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## Kerry Brown (Mar 31, 2014)

I am involved in the domain name industry. I'm on the board of directors for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority a not for profit that runs the .CA domain for Canada. For my day job I am a contract IT consultant. I manage several email servers, networks etc. It is a very interesting time in the domain name industry. Where there were previously only a few generic top level domains (e.g. .com) and country code top level domains (e.g. .ca). ICANN the organization that manages the world wide domain name system added over 1,000 new top level domains in the past year or so. They will be adding 500 to 1,000 a year depending on how many applications they get over the next few years. It has created a bit of chaos in the industry. Quite a few of the new domains are not doing too well. They are not setup very securely. You'll see a lot of spam coming from them as the spammers move to easy targets that don't police their domain well. As for why the spammers do it, it is easy to send out billions of spam with the click of a button for almost no cost. If they get a 0.0001% response rate that's 100,00 responses. Advertisers will gladly pay money for 100,000 responses. Many of the spammers also include malware in the spam, as do the response sites. They make even more money off of that. They create botnets that they can rent out for many illegal purposes.


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## butterknucket (Feb 5, 2006)

I don't know what top domains are, but I've been getting a lot more spam and phishing scams lately.


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## colchar (May 22, 2010)

Guitar101 said:


> It started today. Received 12 with many from one place. I just put them on my spam filter but I'm curious as to why they do it. I never ever open any and I'm pretty sure no one does either so what's the advantage to the spammers.



I guess there are still enough stupid people out there that it remains a viable business model. Otherwise I can't see any point to it, especially as it pisses so many other people off.


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## colchar (May 22, 2010)

butterknucket said:


> I don't know what top domains are, but I've been getting a lot more spam and phishing scams lately.


A '.top' domain is anything ending in .top (instead of .com, .org, .ca, .co.uk, or whatever).

For example, here is the latest one from which I received a spam message - workideaway.top.


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## Electraglide (Jan 24, 2010)

Kerry Brown said:


> I am involved in the domain name industry. I'm on the board of directors for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority a not for profit that runs the .CA domain for Canada. For my day job I am a contract IT consultant. I manage several email servers, networks etc. It is a very interesting time in the domain name industry. Where there were previously only a few generic top level domains (e.g. .com) and country code top level domains (e.g. .ca). ICANN the organization that manages the world wide domain name system added over 1,000 new top level domains in the past year or so. They will be adding 500 to 1,000 a year depending on how many applications they get over the next few years. It has created a bit of chaos in the industry. Quite a few of the new domains are not doing too well. They are not setup very securely. You'll see a lot of spam coming from them as the spammers move to easy targets that don't police their domain well. As for why the spammers do it, it is easy to send out billions of spam with the click of a button for almost no cost. If they get a 0.0001% response rate that's 100,00 responses. Advertisers will gladly pay money for 100,000 responses. Many of the spammers also include malware in the spam, as do the response sites. They make even more money off of that. They create botnets that they can rent out for many illegal purposes.


Damned good money in it for the right people.


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## davetcan (Feb 27, 2006)

I've been getting all kinds of shit lately. I can filter them out pretty easily on my outlook account but it seems to be very difficult in Gmail. They are at least going to my spam folder but I'd really like to stop them before they get that far. Many of them have a four or five letter address like nftwx.whatever, makes it very difficult to filter them out. Assholes. I've tried the "unsubscribe" but I agree, I think it just makes it worse.


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## colchar (May 22, 2010)

davetcan said:


> I've been getting all kinds of shit lately. I can filter them out pretty easily on my outlook account but it seems to be very difficult in Gmail. They are at least going to my spam folder but I'd really like to stop them before they get that far. Many of them have a four or five letter address like nftwx.whatever, makes it very difficult to filter them out. Assholes. I've tried the "unsubscribe" but I agree, I think it just makes it worse.



It pisses me of that Google doesn't make more of an effort to prevent these emails when they do other things in the name of security that make using Gmail a pain in the arse (ie. trying to set up Gmail to work with an email client like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. which I spent too much time trying to do yesterday).


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## davetcan (Feb 27, 2006)

colchar said:


> It pisses me of that Google doesn't make more of an effort to prevent these emails when they do other things in the name of security that make using Gmail a pain in the arse (ie. trying to set up Gmail to work with an email client like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc. which I spent too much time trying to do yesterday).


I'm of the opinion that they make it difficult to completely filter out spam because they're probably getting some kind of kick back from the spammers.


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## davetcan (Feb 27, 2006)

Just wanted to mention that since using "start page by Ixquick" as my browser spam email has dropped by about 80% over the past 3 weeks or so. Could be a coincidence but I doubt it.

StartPage by Ixquick Search Engine


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## fredyfreeloader (Dec 11, 2010)

When I advertise on craigslist or kijiji on my office computer I will get a large number of spam sex ads, these ads will continue appearing until I delete my own business ads, then mysteriously the sex ads disappear. The next time I advertise on my office computer the same sex for sale ads reappear.
When I run the same business ads on one of my other home computers on a different service provider, my ads can run on a daily basis and non of the sex ads appear. The exact same advertising on my part, on craigslist and kijiji, yet a very different result. This is kind of frustrating as I prefer to do my advertising from my office and not my home.


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## jb welder (Sep 14, 2010)

colchar said:


> I have tried to create a Gmail filter for anything with the .top extension but that doesn't work.


This should be the best solution, I don't understand why it would not work.
Maybe I haven't been paying attention to the actual addresses, but I've never seen anything from .top in Hotmail. Actually, I've noticed much less spam than usual. Maybe microsoft has .top blocked? I'll have to start checking the actual addresses in the "junk" folder.


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## davetcan (Feb 27, 2006)

jb welder said:


> This should be the best solution, I don't understand why it would not work.
> Maybe I haven't been paying attention to the actual addresses, but I've never seen anything from .top in Hotmail. Actually, I've noticed much less spam than usual. Maybe microsoft has .top blocked? I'll have to start checking the actual addresses in the "junk" folder.


I've filtered out pretty much everything on MS Outlook with no problem and I now get almost zero spam in that account. I've had a lot more trouble trying to filter stuff out of my gmail account though, it's not very intuitive to me at all.

Most recently it seems there are 100's of hot MILF's in my area looking to hook up (in one way or another).


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## colchar (May 22, 2010)

jb welder said:


> This should be the best solution, I don't understand why it would not work.
> Maybe I haven't been paying attention to the actual addresses, but I've never seen anything from .top in Hotmail. Actually, I've noticed much less spam than usual. Maybe microsoft has .top blocked? I'll have to start checking the actual addresses in the "junk" folder.



If I block an address it works, but if I try to block the entire domain it doesn't.

They are also using other domains such as .win, etc.


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