Totalkly OT: How do I stop SPAM

[geoff]

In message , John writes

Pah - someone spammed my address book

try logging on to find that there are 5,700 emails waiting to download

[geoff]

In message , John Laird writes

Much easier to apply for credit cards in their name, ask for information on septic tanks, etc etc

let someone else do the work for you

[geoff]

In message , Tim Mitchell writes

Which is why spammers stick a load of characters 20 or so in the subject of the email

[geoff]

In message , Ed Sirett writes

Demon are in the process of doing something about spam. They are having to add two new machines a month just to handle the spam. They have realised that a decent spam filter is probably cheaper in the long run than the new hardware investment that they keep on having to make

Tell me about it - see my other post

Ed you can filter out "real" emails on turnpike, I'll phone you.

[John Rumm]

This is where the Baysian Filtering comes in.

Both have very effective spam filtering that learns what you class as spam.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Dave Plowman writes

Not quite. Most spam now comes from Trojaned Windows PCs which are running a mail relay. Spammers scan IP blocks to find them and then pump their crap through them. The problem's worse with the advent of high-speed connections.

Though there are a couple of cable companies in the US who don't care.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , John writes

No-one's yet mentioned SpamPal, so I will.

It works very well in conjunction with Turnpike. I use it to route spam to a spam mailbox, where it gets deleted en masse after a quick glance for false positives.

[chris French]

In message , Ed Sirett writes

When I suffered a dictionary attack I resorted to rejecting all emails to 'unknown' email aliases. I don't really like doing that as I have on occasions had emails sent to mis-spelt email addresses. But the whole thing was just silly.

Luckily it was to a domain that I was stopping using so long term it didn't matter.

One holiday my email box at one ISP filled up, nowadays I tend to leave my machine on at home and let it collect the mail.

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

Better is a genuine address that tells them their mail is unwanted.

me(1-9)@privacy.net has been set up for just that purpose. Try sending email to it.

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

is also worth a look.

[ANt]

Don't use your Name as an email address. It doesn't take a clever algorithm to take a huge list of firstnames and a huge list of surnames...stick them together and append @hotmail, @btinternet, @lycos, @btclick etc etc to construct possible mail addresses.

Saying that, I do use my name as an address...I do get a load of spam...the only one that I don't get spam into is this one !...I guess not many people have the surname 'spam'.

You'll never get spammed if youre email address were [e-mail] (you're unlikely to get any mail actually :-) ) But that's one good way of reducing the likelihood of a random pick.

Ant.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I don't think there are many random pickers out there. Its more a question of simply trawling the net and looking for any likely addresses. Himanintervention to replace e.g. -at- with '@' would be too expensive.

I actually foresee this all dropping off in volume, because very very few people ever respond to it. It may be almost free, but it is very unproductive. Malicious use of spam in DOS attacks and as a virus spreading medium remains the greater risk I feel.

[PoP]

Let's hope that Uncle Bill means business:

he's willing to pump a few gazillion into the project then at least some of the spammers will get what's coming to them.

Though I rather suspect that spam won't really go away until there has been a serious technical rethink on how email is transmitted.

PoP

Replying to the email address given by my news reader will result in your own email address being instantly added to my anti-spam database! If you really want to contact me try changing the prefix in the given email address to my newsgroup posting name.....

[Simon Gardner]

You can forseee to your heart's content. Very, very few people indeed ever respond. But enough do to make it enormously profitable. You need to do your sums again.

[Dave Stanton]

Maybe one day he will do something about the security holes in his software as well !!

Dave

And you were born knowing all about ms windows....??

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think not. I was reading an article in the economist 2004 review - the sales of web adverts are falling dramatically. No one respods. I certainly don't. Spam is OK not the same thing, but I suspect most people try it once, bexcusae its essentally free, and get so little response that they don't bother again.

We used to do direct TARGETED mail shots - lucky to get 1% response rate. Waste of time mostly. Spanm is untargeted its pure shotgun advertising. .0001%? so you might get one respoinse out of 50,000 shots?

>

[Owain]

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote | We used to do direct TARGETED mail shots - lucky to get 1% | response rate. Waste of time mostly. Spanm is untargeted its | pure shotgun advertising. .0001%? so you might get one respoinse | out of 50,000 shots?

But your targeted postal mailshots would have cost 20-50p or more each. Spam will cost a fraction of a penny each.

Owain

[Huge]

Also, see

[Simon Gardner]

That's right. It isn't.

More than enough to see it continue to balloon.

[geoff]

50.000 in, say, 10,000,000 is still a result