TelkomSA - Spam

[mikkelz_za]

Ok, so what's the deal with having an alias created for my TelkomSA "Advanced" account about 2 weeks, ago and about 50% of the mail I get there is SPAM?!

HOW ON EARTH does this happen? No wonder they have SPAM filters on www.telkomsa.net

Absolutely f**king rediculous. Never experience SPAM to such a degree before. Anyone else got this?

 

[bb_matt]

I don't use my supplied telkom email address, quite simply because it's too easy for spammers to generate random mail addresses for it with a decent enough hit rate. It's a good target because there's bound to be lots of users. Also, I've no idea what Telkoms policies are regarding privacy or how good thier spam filters are. I've heard some bad things about telkom email, so I avoid it, even though I've got a few accounts - big deal, email is so cheap and available, no need to use the one supplied by telkom.

The only way to truly avoid spam for your main email account - the one u use for business purposes - is to register an obscure enough domain name and try to keep from using it on the www. Rather use a gmail or yahoo account for www stuff like registering on websites. Do yourself a favour and spend a setup fee of maybe R200 and thereafter R30 a month and get your own domain for your business mail. It's well worth it. For a buck a day, you'll get spam free mail - of course, that depends how u use your account !

I've got a really obscure domain name, but I also have an open ended alias setting where anything@mydomain will get sent to me. I get very little spam - maybe 2 a day and I've been using the domain for 2 years.

On my old work account, I was hitting 100 spams a day - that's because the addy had been in existance for 5 years and I hadn't kept it a secret !

 

[mikkelz_za]

Just goes to prove how rubbish Telkom/TelkomSA is. You pay for a "service" which includes 2 email address, 5 aliases and before you've even logged in, you've got a truckload of spam. Cancelling this TelkomSA account and moving to another ISP next month. I have my own domain which I use for mail, but stilll, I thought I could use this. Not a chance!

 

[ic]

...The only way to truly avoid spam for your main email account - the one u use for business purposes - is to register an obscure enough domain name and try to keep from using it on the www...

Spammers are pillaging the whois db's more & more these days, so even if you register an obscure domain name, it can still be found using wildcards...

The domains that I have registered & control are all hosted with companies that offer unlimited (dynamic) email aliases ([email protected]), which all gets forwarded to a Net@ddress account, where everything gets spam filtered (Brightmail) and then according to rules I have setup, forwarded to individual pop3 accounts (with guid like pop3 account names). That way 99.9% of spam never reaches the targetted recipient, and no local bandwidth is wasted on retrieving spam.