SPAM

Utter Frustration | 7/15/03 | self

[pabianice]

Well, it's finally happened. Spam email now outnumbers my real email, on both my personal and business email accounts. I use both Giant Spam Blocker and Norton Firewall/Spam Blocker. Nothing seems to work any longer. Spam is apparently now sent to every conceivable email address using computer random address generators. ISPs either cannot or will not take steps to solve this problem. I just read that at least $ 10 billion a year is now lost by US businesses because of spam email.

If any other Freepers have found a solution, please post here.

[x1stcav]

I get 50 - 100 spams emails a day. If I spend 5 minutes day deleting them I'd be surprised. OTOH, I do get email from industry sources, unsolicited, that I find useful in my business.

For me, this far outweighs the small amount of time I spend liquidating spam.

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[Jay D. Dyson]

The first thing I did was blackhole the entirety of Asia (Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and so on). That cut the spam load down by around 80%.

Then I blackholed dial-up pools where I found them. (Most ISPs now use centralized mail servers, so that won't keep joe.user@bigisp.com from e-mailing you). That cut spam down by an additional 10%.

On occasion I supplement my blackhole list with data from the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS).

Then I implemented a whitelist program called the Tagged Message Delivery Agent so that new folks who write me out of the blue actually have to respond to my TMDA system before I'll see their e-mail. Folks (and e-mail lists) that I want mail from are already configured in my "white list" so their mail gets through without the confirmation challenge.

Just with these four simple solutions, I've managed to knock spam from hundreds of messages a day to perhaps 5 a week. A vast improvement.

-Jay

[Ramius]

There are many good spam filtering apps. I use a filtering *service* that seems to have a little more intelligent algorithm than most: http://www.postini.com

I've been very pleased with this outfit. Where I was getting maybe a hundred spams a day, now I might only get one or two. Occasional false positives, but pretty rare and now I have a pretty good whitelist.

[annyokie]

Spybot, my FRiend. Zone-Alarm,too.

[LouD]

I highly recommend a subscription product called SpamNet, from a company called Cloudmark. I've been using it since it was in early beta testing, and I gladly signed up to pay for it once it reached final release. It costs a couple of bucks a month, but it's worth it. It zaps 95% of the spam I get. Without it, I get somewhere between 50-100 pieces of spam a day. With it, one or two junk e-mails make it through. I've only had it misfile worthwhile stuff as spam a few times, and once it learned that I wanted those e-mails, they were not misfiled again.

www.spamnet.com or www.cloudmark.com

[katze]

My ISP has a filter that prevents spam, and that is the only way to go for me; it is a local ISP and a good one. I had Qwest for a couple of years, but inudated with spam, and while they said there was nothing they could do, offered to sell me anti-spam software; we parted company immediately.

There are some good articles on spam in the new (Aug) issue of PC World, and I think you can read online at pcworld.com.

[GSWarrior]

Not SPAM, but I get the same pop-up all the time...just one...it's an advertisement to stop pop-ups.....grrrr!

[Salo]

I use spam assassin to protect my domain at work.

For home: 1. never post your email address to usenet news or on your web site. 2. only give your email address to friends and family 3. ask that if anyone sends mail to you and other recipients, that you be blind-copied 4. set up a yahoo address (free) and use it for all web registrations.

[Jeff Gordon]

I believe vigilante action is needed. Identify, track down and knee cap the five worse spammers once a year.

[discostu]

I've noticed since the do-not-call list started my spam has tripled. I pre-filter via my ISP's web interfaces for faster deletion.

[Kaslin]

The best thing is to ask your ISP to let you change the name you use for your email account. I did and it works

[Gorzaloon]

My ISP has a filter that prevents spam, and that is the only way to go for me; it is a local ISP and a good one. I had Qwest for a couple of years, but inudated with spam, and while they said there was nothing they could do, offered to sell me anti-spam software; we parted company immediately.

Hahaha! Qwest, that spam nest. They tried telespamming me one night and got an earful. Thought I might want them as a phone company.

[Jay D. Dyson]

What is "blackhole"-ing and how do you do it?

You either sign up with a realtime blackhole service and configure your mail system to consult their service when accepting mail, or you block at the border router every offending netblock.

See Google for more examples.

-Jay

[arasina]

What I've always wondered is if the people who send SPAM actually reel in any suckers. Do that many people like porn and phony Viagra?

Fortunately I receive only about 3 SPAM emails per day so it's not difficult to delete. One of my sisters uses something called MAILWASHER that she says works wonderfully.

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

I noticed recently on a new website just put up by MIT that Verizon was the biggest contributor to Ted Kennedy’s campaign fund. Verizon has done nothing on the server side that I can see to stop spam. I would be happy to see a class action lawsuit to bring Verizon to it’s knees and serve the consumer rather than paying off the fat socialist pig from Massachusetts. If Verizon was put out of business so much the better to show the rest of the ISP’s that spam is wasting a lot of our precious time.

[discostu]

Given how much it costs to send spam they don't need "that many" people. The figures I've seen bandied about say break even is somewhere between 1 (sale) in a million (spams sent) and 1 in 10 million. Pretty easy to be profitable then.