Spam from .stream TLD - what can I do?

Question

Over the last couple of days my personal email address (from my own domain) has started received 10+ spams a day from domains like spin06.stream, spin07.stream, talk05.stream, talk07.stream, all registered in whois to a 'company' in Panama designed to hide whois information (the 'company' is called WhoisGuard Protected).

Clearly some generous soul has just put me on their 'annoy the hell out of him' list.

The spam filter controls on my hosting provider are pretty limited (they're not catching these emails), so I'm unlikely to be able to filter by top level domain, wildcard or similar. The emails themselves are for many different sites and products, so there's not one company I can contact to say 'take me off your list' (I did 'unsubscribe' from a few, which is probably a bad move as it just confirms the email address is live...). Instead presumably some 3rd party spam provider has added me to their list and for obvious reasons they want to hide their real identity.

I can't simply forward all mail to a gmail or similar and use gmail spam filtering, because the mailbox on my personal email address will still fill up.

On the assumption I can't actually filter these emails with my current hosting provider do I have any options but to (a) hope they stop, (b) switch to a different hosting provider which might have more tunable spam filters or (c) abandon my personal email address?

Is there any way to find the spammer?

Answer 1

You can ask your hosting provider to reject messages using the worst TLDs. You can have a list of the 10 worst ones on The World's Most Abused TLDs page at Spamhaus. FYI, I've already receive much spam from the .stream TLD too, and also from the .top one. I suppose that this is safe as users should avoid TLDs with a bad reputation anyway.

Otherwise you can change to a better hosting provider, with better spam filtering.

There's no way to find the spammers, and that's probably why they use such TLDs, which provide them some protection, as mentioned on the cited page above.

Answer 2

These spam emails come from an extremely prolific spam gang that does high-volume spam runs of domains with .stream and .top extensions. Most of the spamvertised domains are hosted by one hosting company (Lanset, a bulletproof spam host) and registered by the same registrar (Alpnames, which sells these domain names for less than fifty cents each).

The spamvertised .stream and .top domains are simply redirectors, almost all of them to justpopularsearches (dot) com, hosted by Confluence Networks. This site pays the spammers a small amount for each hit.

You can:

1. Block all emails containing .stream and .top domains. While some folks don't like the idea of blocking entire TLDs, I have literally never seen a .stream domain that isn't spam. Not even once.

2. Block any email containing a domain in Lanset dot com's IP address space. Lanset is strictly a bulletproof spam host. Anything in their IP space can pretty much be assumed to be a high-volume spam gang domain. Lanset is a firewall-and-forget host.

Answer 3

If you own the domain name of your email address, you can add an MX Record to your DNS to redirect emails to another mail hosting service that have better spam filtering than your web hosting service. For example, to Gmail.

This will allow you to retain your email address at your own domain name, but use Gmail's mail server infrastructure to handle emails. Creating a Google Apps account with your own custom domain costs $5/user/month, and you get to benefit from Gmail's webmail features as well.

Note that this is different than doing a mail forwarding because your emails would no longer pass through your old mailbox.