Totalkly OT: How do I stop SPAM

[John]

I realise this is VERY OT but can anybody help please. I am getting lots of SPAM on a daily basis offering me 'Alpha Male' and 'HGH' 'products'. The mails never come from the same person (so blocked sender won't work).

An example of how a mail is headed is:

From: Joe Bloggs, but when I go into the properties of the mail it is actually from [e-mail]

the From line and actual name are never the same and the actual name is always [e-mail]

I get mail from friends that use msn.com so cannot have a message rule deleting all mail from msn.com accounts.

The mails are never typed (like this) but always colourful with a link to the product, so picking a word in them doesn't work in message rules either, there are no options on the mails to unsubscribe etc, but this probably wouldn't work anyway.

Sorry to be OT but if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it.

Ta

John

[Tim Mitchell]

In article , John writes

Popfile is good, and free. You run it on your pc. You give it the address of your POP3 mail server. You point your email program at Popfile rather than the POP3 server. When spam arrives, you tell Popfile that it is spam. Next time the spam arrives, Popfile will class it as spam (e.g. add "[spam]" to the subject) and you can filter it into another folder or the wastebasket. To start with it makes a few mistakes but after you've corrected it, it learns, and it's pretty good after a few days use. Works much better than setting message rules.

[Dave Plowman]

Yup. I find a combination of !AntiSpam and !SpamStamp stop about 99% of it. And they're both free.

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

visit news:news.admin.net-abuse.email for some guidance.

[chris French]

In message , John writes

Re stopping spam

Setting rules to block spam isn't worth the effort on the whole, there are too many variables .

I used to not bother much about it, but with the increase in spam, and Sven etc. I got a bit fed up, so I started trying out some filtering stuff.

I'm sure a Google/Google Groups search on stopping spam will give you more to read that you'd ever want to.

For me, I find the Bayesian statistics stuff works well - I'm currently using K9. Basically it scans your incoming email and then flags those it thinks are spam in the headers (it works by analysing the text of the emails)

I can then filter this stuff out in my email client, at the moment I filter it out ands then manually delete it, I could of course reject it out of hand if I wanted to.

It's free, see:

[Graham Anstey]

[and other stuff snipped]

Or a more useful suggestion is to install one of the 'intelligent' spam filters. I use PopFile

It is surprisingly accurate, and you can decide whether to delete what it thinks is spam automatically, or to tag it in such a way that your mail client can divert it into a "possible spam" folder for manual deletion later.

HTH G

[David W.E. Roberts]

I have started using Opera to filter my most SPAM-ridden account.

mail client which is built into the browser is quite good. It has a built in SPAM filter which is remarkably effective.

I am not deleting mail from the server. My main aim is to filter out the non-SPAM, then arrange for this mail to go to another account. After a while my space on the mail server will fill up and all further messages will be rejected, hopefully slowly reducing the SPAMishness of my account.

I have already filled up one account, but after leaving it for a couple of months then clearing it again the SPAM didn't seem to have reduced by all that much :-(

HTH

Dave R

[Al Reynolds]

I use "Mailshield Desktop" which is quite effective. I get about 3000 junk mails a month, and it filters about 99% of them. It's designed so that it analyses the messages before you download them from the server, then either trashes them or moves them to another folder (if you use IMAP). I leave it running 24hrs a day on my work machine which is permanently connected to the Internet, but I can't see any reason why you couldn't run it before checking your email, if you only check once or twice a day.

HTH, Al

[Clive Summerfield]

I use spam inspector which does a damn good job of capturing the 300-400 spam emails I would otherwise be hit with each day. Instead they are all tagged with ** SPAM ** in the subject and automatically dumped in the deleted mails folder. Another tip is to force all emails to plain text format.

Cheers Clive

[Christian McArdle]

You could. My idea would be more satisfying, but, I suppose, less likely to succeed.

Christian.

[John Laird]

I read something the other day that claimed there are around 200 major spammers sending 50 million emails per day, *each*. Now things get a bit uncertain, but I am led to believe that many of these spammers are resident in one or two states of the yoo-ess which have declined to make such activities illegal. Free speech or some such crap. (No-one seems to have explained to these good ole boys that all freedoms come with responsibilities.)

Anyway, my idea would be that if enough people could be persuaded to send a paper letter of complaint to a nominated bunch of these legislators, *all at the same time*, maybe a million or so envelopes all arriving in short order and with little to distinguish them from their real mail, and with a real cost in accepting and sorting them (you see the parallels with spam), then just *maybe* they might realise the effects of their "free" speech.

Well, it's an idea. I'm up for a 60p stamp. The major flaw, as I see it, is in persuading a large enough group of people to do so, without, erm well, spamming them :-) I though of a mail entitled "sick of spam?" but someone beat me to it.

[Gavin Gillespie]

Filtering spam is not going to stop it, but merely disguise that it exists

The only way to fight spam is to report it, even if you only report a percentage of it, at least this lets those that are letting the spam through, know that you are making a stand against it.

I use spamcop

and add the following message to the comments box, with every spam that I report. Hopefully, the message will start to get through,

"This person is sending unsolicited email, which is now illegal under European law. ISP's not taking action against the senders of unsolicited email, could also be accused of aiding and abetting the sending of such emails, and the ISP's possibly prosecuted, or have sanctions taken against them."

[Matt Beard]

Two good options...

1) Install "POPFile" from - This takes a little work, but is very powerful and can be used for more than just killing spam if you want. 2) Change to an e-mail provider that uses spam filtering - Many providers do this as part of the service - it doesn't always stop the spam getting to you, sometimes they just set an option in the "header" to say that they consider the message spam (handy if one of your friends sends you a ligitimate e-mail that looks quite like spam!!)

[Dave Plowman]

99% of ISPs that the spam comes from don't care.

[Bob Eager]

I've copied that and will use it (after correcting the two gratuitous apostrophes).

It's worth mentioning that reporting via spamcop is free, but it's also cheap to have a filtered spamcop email address that you can use in news postings. Works well for me.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Register a domain or transfer our domain to clarnet, and use their mail filters.

They have wildcard matching so you can just select what yiu w=ill receive from.

Also, never use your real email address I have things liki=e [e-mail], [e-mail] and these are explicitly ailised to my real name. If one of them gets troublesome,. I ditch in favor of [e-mail] etc and bin the old one. Its working reasonably well so far. Oh - never use your real e-mail addres or oinded a valid one n here (usenet) its just plain stoopid.

[Ed Sirett]

OK. So you follow their advise you track down the 'real' rather than the forged source of the E-mail.

You then find a) The account was with (say) AOL it was a trial free trial version - AOL have now closed the account, the spammer moves on. b) You get no responce from [e-mail] c) You get no responce from [e-mail] but for different reasons.

Rant on.

In retrospect I would never have published my email address but now the cat is out of the bag I find being with Demon and using Popfile sorts the 99% junk from the 1% real almost perfectly.

A bigger problem for me is that quite a bit of spam is sent out fraudulently in MY name - or rather from imaginary users at MY domain. I (as postmaster@makewrite...) then get seriously spammed (around 500 a day) by various mail and filter program explaining why they are not delivering stuff from numsxy1@makewrite.... etc.

A few bogus users are easy enough to handle. Then last month the F**KING scumbags started generated spam fraudulently in the name of _random_ bogus users @makewrite... For this I now have to run a filter on my son's W95/OE5 machine to delete all the trash from time to time. If I don't do this the mailbox will fill up at demon and the response time for downloading becomes so long my E-mail client times out... After my summer holiday demon rang up to ask what I was doing about the

24,000 emails in my inbox!

Rant off.

[Stephen Williams]

I use a program called Quick Delete. You run it before running your email program and it gives you a view of what is waiting to be downloaded from your Pop3 server. You then delete the stuff you don't want and leave only the emails you want on the server. You immediately run the email program and you will find that you only have the wanted emails sent to your PC.

The program can be obtained from

Good luck

[mike ring]

"John" wrote in news:brsi57$8hf$ [e-mail]:

No one has suggested Mailwasher so I will.

It's a free prog from

It looks at he mail on your server and lets you see the headers and mark the ones you don't want for deletion BEFORE the ever get on to your computer.

You can add a couple of simple rules and run a blacklist with one keypress and it will premark most spam for deletion, you still eyeball the headers before processing mail.(all spam progs can make mistakes) it will then run your email prog.

Been around quite a time and I still find it the easiest to use, and mostly I never even open my email programme as I rarely (sigh) get personal mail

mike r

[chris French]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

well, I've managed it for years without causing me problems, as ever it depends.

I use different 'from' and 'reply' to' addresses- and have been for a few years now.

The From addresses get harvested, and I get a fair bit of spam to them. However the 'Reply to ' addresses rarely get any spam . So people can still contact me easily if they wish.

If any of the addresses do start to attract to much crap it is an easy thing just to change the email alias to a new disposable one.