Stopping SPAM

Three specific rules in my thunderbird message filters seem to kill a huge proportion of what I don't want to see

X-Complaints-To: contains "

From: ends with "@diybanter.com"

Organization: contains "NewsgroupDirect"

There might be some friendly-fire if any of your favourite posters use those services, so test them with an action to just mark them before changing it later to delete etc, but nothing of any loss to me ...

I would have thought so. I'm on Claws-Mail, and have about fifty rules to move the junk to another folder, from which it gets deleted. Probably a few of them are obsolete now, but it's not worth the effort to find out which.

It probably takes about twenty seconds to add another rule, but I only need to do that about once a month. Once you have the first dozen obvious ones blocked, it helps a lot, and you can take your time to block the rest.

Or look back through the previous posts about how to kill the spammers with minimal collateral damage. I have previously posted some tricks specific to Thunderbird that will get cross posts.

Can't be more than 6 months since it was last discussed in detail.

Requires minor customisation of the headers but quite easy to do. I hardly see anything they post these days unless someone who is whitelisted quotes it.

Do you by chance have your previous mails .... never put any rules into Thunderbird so welcome any tips of rules & applying them

any chance you could send me a snapshot of what you have set ?

The DIY wiki has hints

if there's a header that doesn't exist as standard, you can add it under "customise" at the bottom of the drop list, take note of the "match all" or "match one of" radio button.

Joe, I think that you and I are possibly the only ones contributing to this thread via the Eternal September news server so are you able to tell whether the rules you have set up are solving the problem or whether it might be something else?

I'm asking because whilst Google Groups is an absolute shitshow, I'm receiving hardly any spam and virtually none of the repetitious -erme- schpam spam. The only filters that I have in place are with respect to individual posters so I think that Eternal September must be filtering out the rubbish.

Anybody else care to switch temporarily to Eternal September and see what happens?

Nick

Don't think so. I do actually see the rubbish in the folder I send it to, and I can't open uk.d-i-y without some more piling up. I've had fifteen since 10:18 today, and this morning when I opened Claws, there was around 80, since about 21:45 yesterday. The stuff also comes from uk.politics.misc, and I don't keep track of how many from each. It's broadly the same idiots. I'm not counting the semi-trolls, sometimes they post something useful.

I actually have googlegroups.com and groups.yahoo.com on my mailserver blacklist as they are very hot on anything suspect sent to their customers, but not interested at all in spam coming from their customers. Last time I made the attempt, many years ago, I found they didn't accept mail to 'abuse' or 'postmaster', so on the blacklist they went. Along with all the companies who don't honour 'unsubscribe' requests, and there's quite a lot of them.

This doesn't affect Usenet, of course.

I've got precisely 6 items which have been automatically routed to my junk folder - and that's since 2015! So I don't think my newsreader (very elderly paid-for version of Agent) is anything to do with it. If it's not ES doing the filtering then I'm at a loss about what it might be.

Nick

Yup, fortunately that is easy to kill.

Here you go:

I have been using ES for a few months now. I don't think they filter much, although probably more than the plusnet/giganews server used to.

I find that 4 filters are close to 100% effective for me. One to kill cross posts, one for remailers, a dedicated one for rod and all his socks/sycophants and a generic match any "from" one for the remaining oxygen thieves.

The one on cross posting will do the most good I suspect - will apply

Rules working ... all the SPAM mails have now gone Thanks for your help guys

A fairly good heuristic is that nothing good comes out of alt.*

And with a very small number of exceptions out of soc.* either.

Newsgroups contains ", " or "alt." will kill all cross posts and just those that include alt.* somewhere in the list.

Bullshit.

Plenty of useful stuff in cross posted posts.

I have found there is a fairly small list of target groups that spammers seem to like including - just matching a hit on any one of those seems remarkably effective while still allowing through ones you might care for. I have one called "specific crossposts" with just 7 groups names in it, that seem to be like spammer catnip! :-)

(obviously you can also make that kind of logic explicit by placing "stop processing" filter in front of a "kill all" one)

Hi,

I too have had enough of those trying to spoil this group. Trouble is that this is the only group I contribute to so paying for a usenet type subscription isn't really viable for me. So, I use google groups via a web browser to access this group from my phone and my laptop. Trouble is that it doesn't seem to have any functionality to filter out spam. TBH I don't quite understand how this stuff works but is there a free option available to me to access the group from phone and laptop as well as being able to filter out the spam?

A one year subscription to the German newsserver is only 10 Euros, Thunderbird is free, and has an easy to use filter.

Is 10 euros a year for NIN really that hard to find ?

Yes, there are 2 free news servers.