best way to defeat spam

I use a number of methods, the most effective is my Net@ddress account, which sits inbetween my [email protected] and my pop3 accounts (I have several & Net@ddress has forward & notification filters to split stuff & send it on its way).

Also, you should still be able to do a trial signup for 3 days to see how it works & decide later if you want to go ahead with it.

<added>Net@ddress Anti-Spam Features
  • Automatic Brightmail Spam Filtering
  • In addition, create your own Spam Filters
  • Micro-level-control over the previous 2 options: either auto-delete, or store in Junk folder.
  • Disposable Aliases- create email addresses to give out for signups etc & if you don't want email from the signup source anymore, just delete the disposable alias, no hassling with unsubscribes that don't work.
  • "Hide images from the Internet in HTML messages" when logged-in & viewing your emails from the webmail site (i.e. don't trigger images used to track whether or not your email address is active).
  • Strip out attachments with Notification Filters that you define.
  • Automatic Anti-virus scanning.
  • Whitelist filters - you can create a Spam-filter that defines everything as spam & then allow only specific emails through with Whitelist filter(s).
  • You have complete control, any change is instantaneous.
</added>
 
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If your already getting a lot of spam on your main business email address, you'll need to start filtering it somehow. If you have access to the server you get your mail from and it's a Linux box, you can run something like SpamAssassin.
You can also setup mail rules in your email application, but that's a real mission.

A few tips to prevent getting tons of spam :-

1. Get a gmail/yahoo type account to use on the web for all forms/forums - almost everything. Never let your business address near any web form. Gmail is perfect for this, as it has it's own build in spam checking routines. Obviously your not going to want to use that gmail address when ordering something online :)

2. Get a email inbox checker, something like eremove :- http://www.snip.net/help/eremove.htm
These types of programs will login to your mailbox and return just the headers from the email, you can then delete any mails that you want. The good thing about this is that sometimes spam contains hidden images etc. that add a log to the originating server when accessed, which allows spam sending programs to know they've got a valid email address (this is just one method)
Another cool thing about it is you can check for large attachments, you know, the stupid 1meg pic you've seen 50 times before - that type of stuff.

3. Change your email address over time - this is something I did over a period of 3 months, notifying everyone to update thier address books. I eventually received just spam on the old account and terminated it. I had to do this because my old address had been out on the web since 1998, before spam was a real problem, so the damn thing was everywhere - I must've been on every spam database on the planet. Even using SpamAssassin would still see me getting 20 spams a day.

My new account I get about 3 a day, which I get rid of with eremove. It's been like that for a year now, so I'm winning the battle using my simple methods.
 
I have three "business" websites with email which come with spamasasin runing and that catches a bunch. I then preview all email from these and several other different addresses with Mailwasher Pro (which I bought) and that linked to spamcop where spam can be reported. My sentech address is only for mail with sentech.
 
Use an ISP with effective spam filtering. I know many people hate M-Web (overpriced, useless extras blah blah) but one thing they do have is effective spam filtering. I get only about 2 or 3 spam messages per month that slip through their filtering.

Edit: I know the above isn't very helpful if you're on MyWireless but many ISP's provide e-mail only accounts at decent rates.
 
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Hosting companies are also an option - I find Hetzner pretty good - they do have spam filtering which you can turn on/off and the basic hosting accounts are very cheap. What I like about thier email offering is that you can use thier SMTP server from any location in the world, so long as you authenticate by connecting via POP3 first.

I've never actually used and ISP's email address since I got online in 1995 - I've always had an address independent from them.

In terms of checking email headers before downloading, I tried mailwasher but found it to be total overkill for my needs, however, it is more powerful than the eremove program I use.
 
Since I started using Mailwasher Pro, and specifically it's "bounce" capability ... my spam has reduced to almost nothing!!
 
One of the better programs I've tried is Spamihilator (http://www.spamihilator.com). Worked very well and learns quickly. At one stage my original email address was receiving over 200 spams a day. This program had around a 99.2% accuracy while I was using it. Check out the plugins for additional spam filtering.

Another useful program is popfile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net)

I preferred using Spamihilator as it had a memory footprint of around 400K.

Otherwise, the basic do and donts for spam filtering are:

1. Never use the spam messages "unsubscribe" link. This only confirms your email address to the spam company. And even if they do remove your address from their database, they sell it to the next company to cover the cost.

2. "Hide images from the Internet in HTML messages" which was mentioned by ic. This is now a default in Outlook Express and Thunderbird and Im guessing Outlook as well?

3. Dont forward email with everyones email addresses visible. Remove those in the email body and dont use the To and CC fields. Hide the recipients using the BCC field.

4. Dont reply to spam messages, as 90% of the time the Sender address is not the real sender.
 
Another thing, for non-essential sites move on if they don't offer one or more RSS feeds - do not give out your email address, if you must, rather give out a disposable (throw-away) email address.

[thread=16624]In the interests of dredging-up recent history that has already been laid to rest...[/thread]

Nowadays I hardly get any spam in my Inbox, but one of my favourite things I used to do: follow the link to the whatsit site that spammed me, change my email address to their [email protected] or whatever, some of them didn't allow you to enter their own domain - I usually put in the next recent spammer domain I could think of.
 
3 things. No actually 5...

Hi

As a win2k user, once suffering from spam overload, I've found

i) agv anti-virus
ii) K9 anti spam
iii) google (and other) spy/malware killers
iv) zone alarm
v) regular updates from microsoft (Shock. Horror. Probe!)

pretty much has cleaned up my life.

Helped that I bounced a lot of my extra unwanted mail out of my free accounts at mighty.co.za and ananzi.co.za for a few months by "forgetting" to collect mail.

And by converting to bigfoot.com for my redirect mail.

Now get about three spams a day (I kid yea not) none of which make it to my inbox. But what a drag to get here.
 
vowthorn said:
short of changing emails anyone suggest an effective mehtod?
Click to expand...

I get dozens of spams a day which I now filter with SpamCatcher. It's not perfect but it filters most of them out and dumps them into a separate box and ones it's unsure about into another box. Trouble is, I'd like to but I can't change this e-mail address. So many legitimate people have it and the mailing lists I belong to. (I have others that are totally spam free which I give to clients)The mail rules worked to a point and were nice because they deleted spam off the server but it's such a mission.

Has anyone tried Spam Vampire? It brings up a number of ethical issues and there are many people on both sides of the camp. The most vocal are anti. What you do are multiple graphics requests from the site spamming you thereby increasing their bills and hopefully getting you dropped from mailing lists. Can be potentially dangerous stuff. Have a look at: http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/

The source code is available on this page. But ... this is where my technical capabilities come to an end. Can someone explain how to edit and use the source code? From my side, anything to hit back, particularly against the Canadian pharmacies ....
 
Perdition said:
Use an ISP with effective spam filtering. I know many people hate M-Web (overpriced, useless extras blah blah) but one thing they do have is effective spam filtering. I get only about 2 or 3 spam messages per month that slip through their filtering.

Edit: I know the above isn't very helpful if you're on MyWireless but many ISP's provide e-mail only accounts at decent rates.
Click to expand...

I was quite shocked to note that I got over 100 Spam Emails last month alone. I clicked on MWeb’s Junk Mail Filter recently, which is enabled by default. Lo and behold my statistics were quite alarming actually.
I have got about 3 that slipped through in the last month or so.
All I do then is Right Click the Email, Properties, Details, Message Source and then use Ctrl A, Ctrl C and then open a new email addressed to [email protected] and finally Ctrl V.
Within a few days I get a reply thanking me and saying the following,


"Your query sent to us has been traced to the originating domain.
They have been requested to take action in accordance with their Terms of Service against the user/s responsible for this Spam."
 
Net@ddress is effortless, I only get 1 spam email at most per week now, when I do get one, I select it (checkbox) & then hit the "Submit as Spam" button, which automatically forwards the email to Net@ddress.
 
BTTB said:
I was quite shocked to note that I got over 100 Spam Emails last month alone. "
Click to expand...

Hah hah! 100 in a month? That's nothing. I get that in less than four days! Which is why I'm feeling quite aggressive about it. I've done a bit of reporting to service providers which has cut down the voume (believe it or not).

Another reason I'm feeling aggressive about spam is that for a couple of months the spammers were using my e-mail address in their forged return headers and I was receiving dozens of bounced mails a day. I reported it to the FTC as identity theft. They responded, but I don't know if helped. I suspect the spammers use an address for a while and move on. If you do a bit of sleuthing you find these spams come from all over the world.

The problem with spam is that it wouldn't work unless there were some suckers. Thus, the spam needs to be filtered at the server level before it reaches the suckers. The problem with existing spam filters is that they can also get it wrong and filter out legitimate mail. Maybe the answer is statistical filters that learn. Read this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/wfks.html.

Any comments?
 
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