SPAM how to fight it and still keep in contact.

[rchristensen]

Spam is killing me, I have used the Spam blockers and they have done a good job but it is getting to the point that they can't block everything anymore. The only way I see is to use the high setting which blocks everyone not in my address book. That will work good for all the people I communicate with routinely, but the only problem is if someone new to the Forum wants to contact me and I don't have his name in my address book then I will miss it.

I'm wondering what others are doing to block Spam and still get their mail.

I want to keep my primary address at Earthlink as it works well when I am on the road and I need internet connection, when I am home I have it downloaded into my high speed connection.

My thinking now is to put the high Spam blocking on this address using my address book as the filter, then create another address on Earthlink for Forum use only which should prevent a lot of spam and if it gets too high change addresses.

By the way I checked out my address book and notice some of you guys that I have communicated with over the years have changed your Email address up to three times. I had quite a few to delete.

I'm sure lots of others have the same problems with the Spam and I wonder how you have dealt with it.

 

[mgonitzke]

I have had good experiences with the free yahoo email addresses. Their spam filter will catch nearly everything. I've only had one or two things get into my inbox that should have gone to the spam filter. (And I've had this address nearly a year.)

 

[jegstad]

Richard,

I don't know what email client you use but I do not use Outlook Express, instead I use Outlook which comes with Windows Office. Outlook allows you to retreive only the message headers from the your post office server. That way you can look at the subject, the sender name, and the message size before you retrieve the mail. If you do not want it you can tell the server to throw it away. Outlook also has the spam filters but this manual look at things is a barrier that you can use to good advantage. Emails you tell the server to toss never reach your machine.

Before I went to Outlook I was also getting a lot of spam and virus emails. I tried several other free clients that had good reps but they had the same problems in letting the emails actually reach my machine. About 8 months ago I did a clean reinstall of XP, installed Outlook, and haven't had problems since. At first spam was showing up because I was still on someone's lists. I had seen enough of these that I could recognize them and had the server delete them before I retrieved the emails I wanted. Eventually the spam died away and I almost never see any now and I do not have any address filters set up. Looking at the headers first is another step to do but well worth it IMHO.

BTW sometime after I did the reinstall my ISP did some changes to their system and supplied some filtering capabilty for their end. I have not configured anything specific on my account but the system changes themselves may have also improved the service in this respect.

FWIW, etc

JimE

 

[bmcmeen]

Speaking of spam blocking...

A killer here at the forum are folks that have ISPs that block damn near EVERYTHING by default, requiring the subscriber to allow things in. OF course, 99% of the time, people who sign up for an account here NEVER let [email protected] thru their spamblocker, causing their activation key to bounce. And yes, we let them know that they should let it thru during registration. But we all know how folks read...

Richard C. -

It pays to be a geek in this instance

Here, I run my own mailserver on Linux. As such, I utilize SpamAssassin to sort out the crap before they get to my inbox. For now, they all have [SPAM] prepended to the Subject line - that way I can sort them all out into a separate folder. Since aggressive spam filtering can generate false positives, one still needs to scan thru the junk to make sure it was all a proper "hit".

I've configured my mailserver to drop all conversation with certain senders, most notably from countries where a lot of this stuff originates.

Once it gets to my inbox on the server, I grab it with Outlook 2003 - using IMAP, I can have separate folders stored on the server that I can access from the office. Only downside is that (of course!), Microsoft's IMAP implementation in Outlook (not Express) only works well with Exchange servers, not *NIX servers.

I will note that at the office we use a Barracuda spam firewall, which is not much more than a commercial implementation of SpamAssassin.

 

[rchristensen]

Bryan
Yea that is what I am trying to prevent, I don't want to block anything from the forum coming in.

Jim and Matt
I'm running outlook express, I have outlook but have not tried it. I have an account with Hotmail where I use my address to block all spam and then download the headers for the spam when I am looking for something. I use the hotmail for things like EBay and registering things, that way I know when something is coming and I can look for it and if I want to continue getting it I can put it in my safe list.

With Outlook don't you block spam at your computer? I want to block it at the server so I don't download anything I don't want and hopefuly also block any virus that may be attached.

 

[bmcmeen]

Richard C. -

Yes, for most of the folks out there, Microsoft figured that they'd protect everyone for them, thus they put a form a spam protection in Outlook itself.

But in my situation (and for anyone with an ISP that lets the user easily control the server's spam blocking), Outlook's spam filtering is useless as it's done at the server level.

Ya know, I cringe whenever I see that AOHell commercial where the mother walks into the boardroom with her baby and says something about wanting automatic spam control. Yikes!!! No you don't!

 

[rtunison]

Bryan, I can't access the new killer kohler
article. Yes I have 6.0.1 I receive the page can't be found screen. Any help from your geekdom would be apprecited.

 

[rtunison]

Thanks for fixing the link Bryan.