Email Spam

[DBoy]

I use Outlook.

I have 4 email addresses that I have to attend to.
All 4 are listed on dozens of websites and feedback forms out of necessity.

Monday morning 9- 10am. I have just taken the time to delete 243 spam messages before i even get into answering the real emails.

Surely there is a better way? What am i missing?

[Lós Kasino—]

If your email addy is displayed on website -

encrypt the address from spyders: -

http://www.safeemail.org/

[fooishbar]

not really, sorry. if you have multiple addresses, you're screwed regardless. i've spent the last week or so going around killing all of them except my primary one since i get in the order of 500-600 a day just in my inbox, plus up to about 40000 total in the spam folder (which i trash semi-regularly). ugh.

[mrj]

I just received an email (internal) about spam

apparently we have had in increase in spam nationally of 59% in the past three months taking the % of all emails that we receive that are spam to 91%.

[DBoy]

sounds about right.

[Rob M]

I think you can use 'rules and filters' in outlook [i'm sure you can set this up on a mac too] whereby you can frequently place blocks to emails that do not conform to a certain type of message.

Have them delivered straight to your trash bin.

It's a waste of time bumbling around emails trying to find what's good and what's bad.

[fooishbar]

I think you can use 'rules and filters' in outlook [i'm sure you can set this up on a mac too] whereby you can frequently place blocks to emails that do not conform to a certain type of message.

unfortunately, spam's getting smarter. if there was a bulletproof way to tag spam, people would be all over it, but there isn't. most of them that find their way into my inbox these days have markov chained random words from stuff that has a lot to do with me together. so 'xinput aggregation with xkb' looks like it's quite sensible, but no, just another microcap stock that's ready to explode. sigh.

[DBoy]

and because i have emails coming in from dozens of enquiry forms accross the net i can not decipher what is spam and not easily, so many random addresses, subjects and message types that do actually need attention.

nightmare.

[aspekt]

worldwide it's at least 75%

i have no idea about your IT arrangements but there are mail server spam filters available. It's probably worth looking into external providers of these sort of services if your IT infrastructure/department is pretty basic

the other thing with forms is that you can use style sheets to hide some fields (they're invisible to the user) and give them titles like "subject" so the spam bots enter stuff into them. you then automatically discard any submitted forms that have content in these hidden fields.

[wilks]

I Hate Spam just placed first in Windows IT Pro for Client and Server spam filtering. Fairly cheap also....

[deviant]

why do people bother spamming? Does it ever work? Surely everybody is so pissed off with it that it wouldn't even be effective any more

I have been getting spam lately that make no sense whatsoever, I'm not sure what it is trying to advertise or what it is trying to get me to do..... weird

[JAMESSSS]

Dboy - In your particular case nothing will really help.

I'm guessing you get plenty of emails from random addresses that only vaguely make sense right?

[JAMESSSS]

why do people bother spamming? Does it ever work? Surely everybody is so pissed off with it that it wouldn't even be effective any more

I have been getting spam lately that make no sense whatsoever, I'm not sure what it is trying to advertise or what it is trying to get me to do..... weird

Lots of spam is just fishing for valid email addresses these days I reckon.

You'll see it's got a picture in it often. You open up the email, it downloads the picture form the website (automatically or when you get curous and click on it) and then they scrape the website logs and correlate the image grabbed with the email they sent.

Then they sell your email on.

[Rob M]

People should start using public key encryption techniques to filter out crappy emails who do not maintain a 'shakehands' approach to email delivery.

Governments should hire virtual regulators known as 'postmen' ... Kevin Costner can head the organisation.

If there is so much of a burden on infrastructure why hasn't anyone done anything about it? Isn't there a friggin 'opt-in' policy for marketed emails and campaigns. I'm not 100% sure but I reckon spammers are pretty much breaking some laws in countries that do not have proper enforcement/jurisdiction in place.

[Direkt]

I get tonnes of spam also, it sucks.

I have been getting a little less though of late, namel because:

a) I've set my junk mail filter in Outlook to high - so a lot of shit gets sifted through to trash
b) My antivirus programs updates itself with new spam info regularly, blocking a heap of them and also weeding out viruses and the like
c) I "add to blocked sender" if I'm getting a lot from a certain address...

There's no way to completely block it - but it can be minimised somewhat.

For example: I'd usually get 200-300 emails (95% junk) from the weekend. This morning there were only 40-50 (maybe 50% junk).

[yenks]

seems to depend on the type of email account for me.

hotmail one i have gets heaps in my normal inbox, but i dont use it much.

my yahoo one hardly gets any at all in the inbox, but gets heaps in the spam folder. ive had this email for ages, and Im really satisfied with yahoos spam protection.

my other account on my own domain ive had for only a couple of months is already getting a fair bit of spam, annoying !

I think most spam emails only have like under a 1% success rate, so you can sort of see why they send out as much as possible, but still it sucks arse and i hate spam.

[Lil MiSbreaks]

I love that now all my emails actually from my friends and are correct, being sent to me emails - are the ones going into the spam folder.

Makes perfect sense doesnt it

[factory worker]

I love that now all my emails actually from my friends and are correct, being sent to me emails - are the ones going into the spam folder.

Makes perfect sense doesnt it

I find that will happens especially if they send group emails.

[aspekt]

seems to depend on the type of email account for me.

hotmail one i have gets heaps in my normal inbox, but i dont use it much.

my yahoo one hardly gets any at all in the inbox, but gets heaps in the spam folder. ive had this email for ages, and Im really satisfied with yahoos spam protection.

my other account on my own domain ive had for only a couple of months is already getting a fair bit of spam, annoying !

I think most spam emails only have like under a 1% success rate, so you can sort of see why they send out as much as possible, but still it sucks arse and i hate spam.

If your email address is all over the internet (on your homepage or publicly available on a forum etc) you will get lots of spam as your addressed is harvested by bots that crawl the web.

[ArrBee]

I use a program to check my mail accounts and download the headers only.
Then I delete all the spam before thunderbird downloads the legit mail.

It has choices to create spam filtes, blacklists, friends lists etc and to bounce emails to make it look like your account doesn't exist.

Check it.
http://mailwasher.net/

I haven't got it doing all the whizzy things, but it is quicker and lighter on resources than using a full email client to delete spam.

[JAMESSSS]

I use a program to check my mail accounts and download the headers only.
Then I delete all the spam before thunderbird downloads the legit mail.

It has choices to create spam filtes, blacklists, friends lists etc and to bounce emails to make it look like your account doesn't exist.

Check it.
http://mailwasher.net/

I haven't got it doing all the whizzy things, but it is quicker and lighter on resources than using a full email client to delete spam.

How do you know if there are false positives if you never get to see the mail though?

[DBoy]

I get tonnes of spam also, it sucks.

I have been getting a little less though of late, namel because:

a) I've set my junk mail filter in Outlook to high - so a lot of shit gets sifted through to trash
b) My antivirus programs updates itself with new spam info regularly, blocking a heap of them and also weeding out viruses and the like
c) I "add to blocked sender" if I'm getting a lot from a certain address...

There's no way to completely block it - but it can be minimised somewhat.

For example: I'd usually get 200-300 emails (95% junk) from the weekend. This morning there were only 40-50 (maybe 50% junk).

Nice, sounds promising from a minimalisation front. Where is the block sender function? Can not find it.

I tend to only be able to mark topic as spam rather than have spam folder becuase the filter was marking to many ligit emails as spam because of random sources i need to be able to recieve from.

[DBoy]

I use a program to check my mail accounts and download the headers only.
Then I delete all the spam before thunderbird downloads the legit mail.

It has choices to create spam filtes, blacklists, friends lists etc and to bounce emails to make it look like your account doesn't exist.

Check it.
http://mailwasher.net/

I haven't got it doing all the whizzy things, but it is quicker and lighter on resources than using a full email client to delete spam.

How do you know if there are false positives if you never get to see the mail though?

exactly my delima.

Interesting topic though...

[JAMESSSS]

To be honest the best quality, cheapest solution to your problem is going to be redirecting your mail to a big name webmail provider (gmail, yahoo, whatever. I use gmail and it's pretty good).

They have the money and the incentive to continually work on the problem.

[ArrBee]

I use a program to check my mail accounts and download the headers only.
Then I delete all the spam before thunderbird downloads the legit mail.

It has choices to create spam filtes, blacklists, friends lists etc and to bounce emails to make it look like your account doesn't exist.

Check it.
http://mailwasher.net/

I haven't got it doing all the whizzy things, but it is quicker and lighter on resources than using a full email client to delete spam.

How do you know if there are false positives if you never get to see the mail though?

Perhaps I didn't describe it very well.

The way that I use it is not automatic.
I use the program as a "front line" so to speak. It runs in my systray and is lightweight. I can quickly and easily identify mail that I want/dont want from it's GUI.
I add definate spam to the blacklist and simply delete stuff I don't want to download to my inbox (for whatever reason). then when I open my mail program it only downloads the mail I actually want.
Kind of handy if you are being spamed with larger emails.

When I open it, it trys to classify the mail headers according to...
-Your personal blacklist
-Internet spam databases
-Rules configure by you
You can configure what action should be taken (like any spam filter)
in my case, it just marks them without actioning the delete until I hit "process"

Essentially I just find it quicker to manage spam using this than Thunderbird, or outlook etc. but you can configure it for a more automated approach if you want.

Download and have a go!
Trial version only supports 1 pop3 account from memory.

it handles hotmail accounts in the full version too although I havent tried that.

[deviant]

Just since it clicked over to 1/1/2007 I have been getting horrendous amounts of spam. Normally gmail filters spam really well but this has been all coming into my inbox (probably 1/3 of it into my inbox actually).

weird thing is though all of the spam is from "mailer0-deamon" or "system administrator", or postmater, or similar and even in other languages.

they are all returned mail that was apparently from xxx(substutue any combo of random letters)@rocklikethis.com.au

which on return all get picked up by my "catch all"... I hope they are just phishing for valid addresses and not actually sending mail from xxx(at)rocklikethis.com.au

that would suck.

[nickdivision]

To be honest the best quality, cheapest solution to your problem is going to be redirecting your mail to a big name webmail provider (gmail, yahoo, whatever. I use gmail and it's pretty good).

They have the money and the incentive to continually work on the problem.

thats what i have done. my domain inbox has over 4000 unopened emails, all of which are spam, yet i never see them land in my hotmail account, which is where all of my emails are re-directed to.

[Direkt]

Nice, sounds promising from a minimalisation front. Where is the block sender function? Can not find it.

Just right mouse click button if it's not on your toolbar. It'll be under the 'Junk Email' tab.

I tend to only be able to mark topic as spam rather than have spam folder becuase the filter was marking to many ligit emails as spam because of random sources i need to be able to recieve from.

To be honest, I think it's my anti-virus program that's kicking goals on this front... I think it works in conjunction with Outlook to identify Spam - and it does an awesome job. After having almost 2 weeks off over the festive season I returned to only around 50 junk emails... which is awesome, there were a few hundred in my junk email filter box.

[system]

To be honest the best quality, cheapest solution to your problem is going to be redirecting your mail to a big name webmail provider (gmail, yahoo, whatever. I use gmail and it's pretty good).

They have the money and the incentive to continually work on the problem.

Spot on - it's the incentive thing, really. This is why I don't do my own web or email hosting anymore - no time!

Just since it clicked over to 1/1/2007 I have been getting horrendous amounts of spam. Normally gmail filters spam really well but this has been all coming into my inbox (probably 1/3 of it into my inbox actually).

weird thing is though all of the spam is from "mailer0-deamon" or "system administrator", or postmater, or similar and even in other languages.

they are all returned mail that was apparently from xxx(substutue any combo of random letters)@rocklikethis.com.au

which on return all get picked up by my "catch all"... I hope they are just phishing for valid addresses and not actually sending mail from xxx(at)rocklikethis.com.au

that would suck.

The mail probably is being sent with headers marked as *@rocklikethis.com.au - email headers are ridiculously easy to forge. Perhaps you might want to check your mail filters in your Google account.

'xinput aggregation with xkb' looks like it's quite sensible, but no, just another microcap stock that's ready to explode. sigh.

This still makes me laugh.

[deviant]

The mail probably is being sent with headers marked as *@rocklikethis.com.au - email headers are ridiculously easy to forge. Perhaps you might want to check your mail filters in your Google account.

do you mean sent from me? therefore bouncing back to my inbox from a real mailer-daemon?

or, are they fake mail-delivery-subsystem messages?

I have only two filters to mark certain mail as important. I think I need to turn the "catch all" off in my domain preferences

[system]

The mail probably is being sent with headers marked as *@rocklikethis.com.au - email headers are ridiculously easy to forge. Perhaps you might want to check your mail filters in your Google account.

do you mean sent from me? therefore bouncing back to my inbox from a real mailer-daemon?

or, are they fake mail-delivery-subsystem messages?

They could be a combination of the two. It'd be hard to tell conclusively without checking the outgoing mail logs. SMTP is just waaaaay overdue for a re-haul.

I think I need to turn the "catch all" off in my domain preferences

Probably not necessary to do so. Junk mail filters are generally set to learn from things you mark as spam. This current influx will be dealt with shortly, I'm sure.

[spiral]

i disabled the catch alls on all my domains to bounce everything and its cut down my spam a lot

[deviant]

seeing as I'm using google and don't think I have smtp running on my domain host I reckon they would have to be fake. But, I don't really know how it works

I really don't want to turn off the "catch-all" because I find it quite useful, I can sign up for lists etc etc using an instantly made-up address IE: [email protected]

then if they on-sell or I get jack of their mail-outs I can block incoming to that address without any hassle with unsubscribing bollocks which I don't really trust anyway.

[system]

Don't worry too much about it - just keep marking things that end up in your mailbox as spam and the filters will learn.

[deviant]

My main concern was the fact that it looked like spam was being sent from *@rocklikethis.com.au therefore puting me in jepardy of being blocked/blacklisted......

[system]

My main concern was the fact that it looked like spam was being sent from *@rocklikethis.com.au

There is nothing you can do currently to stop someone forging a 'From' address in an email (AKA an originating email header). A good email blacklist, like ORDB, will check all the headers in the offending email (not just the 'From' entry).

Don't panic. :douglas:

Gah, typos!

[lynt]

SpamFighter saved DMC
A story about filtering emails.

DMC cops loads of Spam, I thnk we clocked about 60% of all email coming in to all addresses were Spam. I installed SpamFighter which uses a central database to determine if the email is spam or not.

Basically, the more people who download and install SpamFighter, report that this email is spam, and the more times that perticular combination of addresses, words, pictures, anything that makes up the email is put in the database, then it gets flagged as Spam and gets denied.

It's probably the most honest and "real life" way of blocking Spam. The more people complain about it, the less chance it has of getting through.

It worked so well that we hardly EVER got any Spam in our inbox, it was all in the Spam folder. Stats were out of control, too.

Highly recommended.

[lynt]

Here's the stats:

Global statistics (incoming e-mail)

Processed: 21228
Blocked: 11169
Ignored: 3583
Ratio: 53 %
Time saved: 15 hours, 30 minutes, 45 seconds

[deviant]

over what time frame?

[lynt]

over what time frame?

Never mind that.