Too much spam


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I am receiving up to 30 spam emails a day and am going nuts. I need a way to stop it. I am using the spam filter in NIS 2003 which seems to catch most of it, but not all. I have tried the opt-out links (which personally doesn't make sense to me - why opt out when I never opted in?), nut the opt-out links all say I either am or will be removed. Yet, I continue to receive a ton of spam. A lot of it has forged headers. In the past, I used to forward it to abuse@yahoo.com, but now when I do I just get a response back saying it's not really from them. Someone please help me!

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NEVER click opt out links, they don't opt you out only confirm your email address. Who hosts your email? If it's someone like Hotmail or Yahoo there isn't much you can do except use there built in filtering systems. But if you are using your ISPs email you can contact them and see if they will install some filtering software on there mail server. That or you can get clients like Eudora Beta and Thunderbird that will filter the spam.

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First...

Stop clicking on those Opt Out links. They're only present to confirm that your account is active. Then the spammers sell and trade your e-mail address around, sign you up for more and more services.

Don't post your e-mail address publicly. If you need to, use some letters to spoof automatic searches for e-mail addresses. Like, for instance, if my e-mail were whackykhaki@hotmail.com (its not), it would be safer to type in QQQwhackykhaki[at]hotmail.comQQQ, and just tell people to not be stupid and remove the Qs before they e-mail you.

If you're using hotmail, register a new temporary account (netscape.net is quite good and free), and wait 60 days without logging into your old hotmail account. Any spam that gets sent to it will be deleted or bounced because they will suspend your account after 30 days. So, your e-mail address will get labeled as a fake, and deleted from the spam lists. After 60 days or so, log back in and you should see a reduction in spam.

Fight spam by putting up tons of fake e-mail addresses if you have a website. ljfgodioreghouwer@jdioagw.net, etc. Make it harder for spammers to collect valid e-mail addresses.

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yeah those opt out links are :devil: dont use em!

If you think your being spammed out my flat mate gets about 100 messages a day all of which seem to question the size of his genitals!! :)

Al

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SpamCop has a free reporting system and they also filter pop3 accounts (for a yearly fee).

Unlike SPAM software, these filters happen BEFORE you download the SPAM.

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Thanks for the idea about SpamCop. Since NIS 2003's spam filter automatically puts the words Spam Alert: in the subject line, I have created an Outlook rule to first forward any email with Spam Alert: in the subject line to SpamCop and then to permanently delete it, unless the sender is in my address book. Hopefully that will cut down the amount of spam I receive over time. Seems pretty easy too, since it can be automated with an Outlook mail-filtering rule.

Thanks again!

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I'm going through the same thing, like everyone else on the net. I use to do all those opt-out links, but figured nothing was working, so they do what the above posts say. They just confirm your email exists. A recomendation was to create a personal address, and only give that to your trusted friends, then have a junk email that you can give to places you order information from. Then a real junk one that you can give to sign up for things like memberships to game video downloads. That way you know your important mail is coming from trusted sources. I know keeping three emails is rediculous, un heard of, and just plain a waste, but it's better than flushing through 100 spam messages about a potential for bigger genitals!

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I like Pocomail which is a email client that I use every day

you can use filter and there is also an option to enable spam filtering that filter BEFORE you download your emails from your isp. then, you can choose the option to delete them directly from the server w/o having to download :)

www.pocomail.com for those interested users

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Yep, SpamPal is great. It checks a whole slew of different RBL lists and has plugins which can add Bayesian filtering (artificial intelligence that learns what is spam and what is clean mail), regular expressions matching with scoring, HTML mail analyzer and all kinds of really neat stuff. :)

Other than that, if you have a Unix account with your ISP, you should urge them to install SpamAssassin and procmail and learn those tools yourself, it'll give the user awesome possibilities of stopping the spam at server level before ever downloading the mail.

SpamAssassin can be configured to do most of what SpamPal does, only SpamPal must still download all your mail and SpamAssassin does it at the server. Those are the differences and those were my two cents...

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The ******s at hotmail sell your e-mail address to 3rd party customers which bypass the spam filte:(:(

No they don't, i have a hotmail account which doesn't recive any spam. One reason would be because i havn't signed up to anything using it.

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No bounce mechanism that you can add to your email client would fool any spammer worth his salt.

The headers will always show an extra hop after the ISP gets the mail, indicating that it was delivered to someone.

The headers must show the mx refusal or bounce as the last delivery.

Try Forte Agent for an email client or build your filter database in Outlook against all the spam that you get.

You will eventually kill 90% of it.

I use Agent and have onlt read three spam mails in the last month. GOOD filters. :D

Stop posting to usenet with your real email address and put a throw-away web account on your website then change it regularly.

"They shoot spammers, don't they?" :devil:

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Bouncing doesn't help as spammers use spoofed addresses. If there IS indeed a real person at the address the spam appears to be sent from, it won't be the spammer. If the address does NOT exist but the server does and it has the SMTP service active, your server will recieve a bounce back (aka a double-bounce) and in rare cases it might cause a bounce loop which can clog your ISP's server. If the address is completely bogus (the server doesn't exist or doesn't run an SMTP daemon) your bounce will achieve nothing. So as you can see, bouncing should NOT be used as a counter-spam weapon. You'll only shoot yourself in the foot, and possibly also take your ISP down with you. :crazy:

Also, bouncing from a tool at your computer is completely useless as it's easily detectable if the bounce actually (on rare occasions) reach the spammer. If any bounce is to be effective, it has to be done at delivery time (when the SMTP service wants to deliver the mail to your account). Even then, bouncing is not recommended because it doesn't really do any good but it may cause ugly results both for you and for your ISP.

The best bet is to install SpamAssassin on the MTA and integrate it somehow with sendmail/qmail/whatever and have it refuse connections at SMTP time (ie while the message is being sent to your ISP's server from a thirdparty server). That way the spammer won't know exactly what went wrong as his connection was cut before his mail was recieved. An even more fun way to use SpamAssassin's RBL and other detection to foil spammers is to have the MTA set up as a 'smart' teergrube, which when faced with a connection which is somehow detected as doing a spam run, downgrades the connection to the bandwidth equivalent of a leaky faucet, thereby letting the spammer send his mail, but radically driving up his cost for transferring to your network which will make it less interesting for him to send spam to that domain. :laugh: :rofl:

And there's lots of fun to be had with spammers over at http://www.cexx.org (specifically the 'Webmaster's Guide to outsmarting Idiot Spammers') :D

Also, get a free account at SpamCop.net and forward all your spam there. It'll help you report the spam to all the right places, and also list the IPs of the spammers, their spamvertized websites and the abused open relays in their RBL service. :ninja:

And use SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org) to check your incoming mail against RBL lists. It can be used with IMAP too, if you're lucky enough to have one of those nifty accounts.

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