How to Stop Spam - Comments

The best way to fight spam is to fight it with the help of a great system that really works. BlueSecurity (http://bluesecurity.com/) is free and works by eliminating the root of the problem.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Stu, I wrote about Blue Security last August. And in a nutshell, I think it's a BAD idea. Using abuse to fight abuse is wrong.

http://www.askbobrankin.com/blue_security_spam_solution.html

Cloudmark, and most other blockers work ONLY if you use Outlook Express for your E-mail. Thes do NOT work for Juno.

I am very glad I have stayed with AOL. I rarely see any SPAM. If something does slip through, I flag it as SPAM, and AOL takes it from there. It sits in a folder for a day or so, so I can change my mind if I was too hasty in clicking the spam box.

I use POPFILE at http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ It's free. Uses Baysian filters and over the past three years is 99.25% accurate at sorting my spam, my wife's mail, mine and replies to the 4 websites I run. This is not a guess, an actual statistic as reported by Popfile. Hmm. OK. May be biased!

BTW: I don't get anything like as much spam now as I used 9 months ago. Why? Something is working!

Good advice, but I believe there's another way spammers get your email address and I rarely ever see it mentioned. You know those people who forward every email the get to all their friends? You know, those people who never remove all the email addresses of all the people it's been forwarded to already? Those emails sometimes contain hundreds of addresses.

If you have people who send you such emails, realize that they're getting spread to possibly thousands of others with YOUR emai address intact. Encourage those people to learn how to use the BCC field when they send email. It's easy, it's just that most people know nothing about it. Here's a great writeup, forward this url to those people:

http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/bcc_field.htm

My free Hotmail account has about the worst filter system to be found! When you mark something as "junk" in your inbox, it goes to your Junk file, only to have to been seen and deleted from there. Why isn't it deleted from the first pick? The Junk file has the same crap coming to it ALL THE TIME, so it's hardly worth making the selection telling them it's JUNK when obviously nothing is being done internally. I've found myself just deleting the crap right from the start, which certainly isn't doing the right thing to combat spammers either . . .

I would also recommend SpamBayes. I've been recommending it to friends and customers for a couple of years now. Very accurate and totally FREE. http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

It cleans up what SpamAssasin leaves behind at the server level. On that note, SpamAssasin is a great server level engine. With some better professional filters added to it, it could be a best of breed solution.

Lots of good points raised. I've been using Spamihilator with Eudora. Much easier than all the Eudora filters, and its free. Uses Baysian, Lists, word analysis, etc. Sadly, I still have to review the spam as it occasionaly grabs something I need. A few suppliers use dumb email serving so I can't white list them.
http://www.spamihilator.com/

If you have a mail server though, check this review out:
http://windowssecrets.com/comp/060126/#story1

Thanks Bob! --David

I've had good luck with Spam Bully www.spambully.com
Spam Bully uses baysian filtering to filter out spam and works with Outlook and Outlook Express
Installs are trouble free and the interface is so intuitive that anyone can figure it out just by looking at it. This filter does a great job!

I admit I haven't read EVERYTHING you have written, but I haven't seen you mention the use of images embedded in emails which are used to validate addresses. As I understand it, some spammers send emails to "guessed" email addresses which include unique links to images on their server. If the image is downloaded from the server then they know they have hit a real, live, in-use email address - which can then be sold.

The solution is to use an email client which does not download images until you ask it to (I use Thunderbird - which incidentally also seems to do well with it's built in spam filters). Thanks for all you do - I enjoy the Tourbus - and have learned lots!