How to Stop Spam - Comments Page 1

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!

I totally agree with KinKstar, but note that no-one has offered any constructive solution to their problem (since 2006!)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Maybe that's because Bayesian filters and collaborative spam filtering are working for a lot of people. If you don't like the way Hotmail does spam handling, switch to another provider. Gmail funnels tons of stuff to my spam folder and I almost never look at it. It gets auto-deleted after a while...

In answer to "null" above, the "constructive solution" to the spam problem (now that BlueSecurity is gone) is KnujOn. Please go to http://www.knujon.com/ to read about it. KnujOn uses all legal means available to shut down the spammers.

One note on this is managing your spam catching points. Gmail has a decent spam filter and also lets you check it before deletion. The only brain-dead thing its done is mark bounced messages as spam. You can then have it forward to your POP account. But be sure to check the spam box occasionally. Add senders to your gmail address book if they have reliability issues.

Eudora full version is now much cheaper (its left Qualcomm to become part of the Mozilla camp) and it includes a decent spam filter.

The key thing though is managing points of spam filtering. You want it in one place where you can monitor it. My domain provider recently added a spam filter and turned it on by default, contrary to prior settings. It bounces messages it deems spam. (stupid) Theres no address book or rules to adjust. I only discovered this as I was forwarding some gmail there and it bounced back. Obviously this is a poor approach (doubling spam moving around the net and confirming your email address) so its now off. Spam control is back in my control.

It's not free (but not that expensive either). For Mac OS X I've found SpamSieve, http://c-command.com/spamsieve/, works very well. As far as I know there isn't a Windows version but its compatible with most Mac email clients.

Two comments. First, people like me who sometimes forward humorous e-mails or other items need to not only learn to use BCC, they need to learn that after you hit the "Forward" button (and before you click "Send") you should go through the e-mail deleting all the previous headers. They're full of details for spammers, they make the email huge, and they slow down the reading process when the email arrives.

Second, some of us HAVE to put our e-mail addies on our websites. I do genealogy, and I need to hear from strangers who will turn out to have family data. I'm comfortable with my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. When Nigerians offer me millions or I win a lottery I never entered, I use the buttons to tell my mail accounts those are spam e-mails, but most penile enhancement ads are recognized by Yahoo and Hotmail.

I am not defending all spammers but I will share this. About four years ago I did buy something from a spammer. My junk mail never increased and the product was good. I would buy from this operation again. I suppose I was lucky. I do not allow HTML in my mails which probably helps. I use a web based service operated by my ISP.

EDITOR'S NOTE: You are part of the problem. Don't buy from spammers. If everyone stopped doing that, they would stop spamming.

little advice: never leave your real email
always use a temporary email address