OT: dealing with spam

[Lobster]

Bloody, bloody spam....

I have a highly protected personal email address which only ever goes out to trusted contacts; however after several years' usage the spammers have finally found me, via two routes over the past two weeks, courtesy of hotmail :(, and I'm now getting regular crap from both routes.

First one was a bit of a shocker: I received a spam email (ie flogging Viagra or something) to my personal 'real' address, which has been sent to one other address - my dedicated usenet address ( [e-mail]). Shocker because I access the hotmail account once in a blue moon, and the only possible link between that and my 'real' address is that I once set that up as a Contact on the hotmail account. My 'real' addreess is the only Contact there, and the spam went only to the two addresses concerned. Can only mean that the spammer's been able to access the hotmail account. God knows how.

Second one is always sent to about five recipients, and is purported to be sent from the hotmail account of someone who I had dealings with a few years ago - plainly his account has been hacked.

I've got various antispam measures in place to filter other email addresses, but I really wanted to keep this one clean; mainly as it goes direct to my phone. Bearing in mind that the more sophisticated spammers to clean their email lists to make them more sellable, I was wondering if there was some method of fooling the spammer that his email has been bounced as 'undeliverable', so he might delete me before passing the address all around the known universe. Or am I already screwed? :(

David

[Huge]

That one.

And spammers don't clean their lists. They don't GAS.

[Tim]

+1. FWIW, Yahoo's and Google's spam filters are pretty gpod.

Tim

[Mike Barnes]

Lobster :

I have operated such an address for eight years now with no spam filter. Then I got a spam message a few months ago apparently from my brother in law. This was like your second instance because it was from his Hotmail address and the "To" list included a few other contacts of his. So obviously Hotmail accounts can be hacked and are hacked.

Needless to say I contacted my BIL straight away and asked him to change his Hotmail password, which he did, when I eventually got him to understand what I wanted.

I got another spam message a week or so later but the good news is that despite my fears there has (so far) been no more spam since then. It seems that the hacker used my trusted address on my BIL's Hotmail contact list to send a spam message but didn't keep it or pass it on. Phew. I hope you're as fortunate.

If your address is on a list, there's nothing you can do about it. However some addresses that I get spam to, I get only one every year or two. In your case, only time will tell.

[Roger Mills]

I've been using Mailwasher for quite a few years - and that is pretty good at getting rid of spam, and allows it to be deleted from the server without ever getting downloaded to your PC.

The version I'm using is an early free one - which allows multiple email addresses. The current free version now only allows one address - but the PRO version is only $30 (about £20) - see

be honest, most ISPs have cleaned up their acts dramatically over the last few years, and zap most spam at source. My ISP is PlusNet, and their spam filters are pretty good. I've also hung on to some Freeserve (Orange) email addresses - from which I had used to get literally hundreds of spam messages per day - so I created quite a few rules within Mailwasher, which succeeded in blocking the vast majority of them. However, very little now gets past Orange's spam filters - so Mailwasher isn't worked nearly so hard. It *is* still useful, though. I get quite a lot of emails which are not spam per se, but which I nevertheless don't want to download into Outlook (special offers from firms I've dealt with in the past, etc.). I keep Mailwasher running all the time - scanning for new emails every 10 minutes. From the list displayed I can zap the ones I don 't want, and download the rest into Outlook.

[Gareth]

Well you could but, as I understand it, the from addresses are often faked so you will probably just end up annoying another innocent person.

I think some of the more advanced spammers link to pictures which are loaded from a webserver when the email is opened so if you delete the spam without opening it you may *eventually* drop off the list.

It may be worth asking in a more appropriate newsgroup but in my non-expert opinion the easiest thing to do is just delete the spam without opening it. It's annoying but unless you are getting hundreds of emails a day it isn't really that hard.

[David in Normandy]

Hotmail must have been badly hacked at some point.

I have also been affected by this too and received spam from several hotmail accounts of people I know. Remarkably one email I received was from someone who has been dead for two years inviting me to join them in a wonderful money making opportunity!

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Divert your mail through a gmail account - whether it tells the spammer it's bounced, I don't know, but it's got a tremendously effective spam filter on it anyway.

[Jim Hawkins]

How do you do that ?

- whether it tells the

Jim Hawkins

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Auto-forward your email from your main ISP account to a gmail account then either collect it from there or set up forwarding from gmail to your second ISP account and auto-download that one. I've found the spam hit rate of gmail is damn near 100% with hardly any false positives over the past several years.

[Mike Barnes]

Grimly Curmudgeon :

AAMOI how many is "hardly any" and how do you know?

[Mark]

Which is why I rarely give anyone a real email address. Generally I use disposable aliases.

[Roger Mills]

Yes indeed. I've hung on to an old Freeserve (FSLIFE) account specifically for that reason. Because emails addressed to {anything}@{account_name}.fslife.co.uk arrive in my mailbox, I invent a new address with a unique 'anything' for each organisation I deal with. If I then start getting spam addressed to that address, it's easy to insert a rule in MailWasher to zap it.

[Huge]

Can I recommend Mailinator once again;

[Tim Watts]

I've gone down this road too

tw+anything@... and tw_anything@... for the dumb klucks who don't read RFCs and disallow the

• sign.

My blacklist is a simple text file which rejects early in the SMTP connection.

[David in Normandy]

Some of these mail cleaning services are more of pain than a help. The company hosting my website started using SpamExperts (Spamfiltering.com) without telling me and I started losing legitimate emails. I'd sooner get several spams than lose one valuable customer enquiry or order. I had a similar problem a while back wanting to get a laptop repaired with a local(ish) business and my email asking for details of their service kept bouncing back from Spam guard or Spam cop or something similar. I gave up in the end and took my business elsewhere.

[Huge]

Mailinator isn't a mail cleaning company. They generate throwaway mailboxes on the fly. So, when a website asks for a mail address, you give them something along the lines of " [e-mail]". If that address receives any mail, mailinator creates a mailbox & puts the mail in it for you. After 24 hours, it's deleted and the mailbox vanishes. If you want to read the mail just go to

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

I checked it fairly regularly in the first couple of years and then didn't bother as it was a waste of time. gmail keeps a list of spam-rejects on the account, ready to be deleted by time or manually.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Who cares? I don't - why do you?

[Jim Hawkins]

What is a gmail account ? Hoiw do you get one ?