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| Spam fighting ideas, anyone? |
| 2002-08-26 |
| Metafilter has a post on a PHP routine that generates 20 or so random "e-mail addresses" for a site, so they can be hoovered up by spambots and theoretically screw up somebody's spam run. First read through, I thought, "Good idea! I'll do the same thing in ASP, and that'll show 'em, by golly." But since spammers often pirate legit e-mail addresses for their "from" lines, I don't suppose it would really do that much to the spammers, only to the sap whose address was nicked. (My Hotmail address has spammed at least three times since I got it, five or six years ago, judging from flurries of bounces I've gotten. On another occasion, my ISP cut me off because my server had spewed forth thousands of e-mails hawking Herbal Viagra without telling me...) And since they sell millions of addresses at a time to each other, I don't suppose twenty bounces from Rantburg's contribution would even be noticeable. At this point, I've simply set my Outlook to take all messages originating with Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Earthlink, Lycos, and a few others, and dump them into my junk mail folder, to be sorted through at liesure, if any. That reduces the junk I see in my inbox to manageable proportions, and the real people at Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. — I think there are nine of them, by my count — can be handled by the exceptions function. If anyone has any better ideas for dealing with this stuff, I'd sure like to hear them... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #6 I’ using a plug-in for Outlook Spam Bully, it's a Bayesian spam filter and it works almost perfect for me. The way SpamBully for OE works is that it views your current email folders' contents and learns from that to help distinguish between spam and regular emails. Also it has a lot of great features such as Friends/Spammers lists, email blocking by country/language, Allow/Block words and phrases, attachment blocking… |
| Posted by: Rick Johns 2004-06-25 7:37:02 AM |
| #5 I've got a suggestion, Fred. Try this Outlook plug-in! |
| Posted by: Joe Katzman 2002-08-26 23:25:36 |
| #4 I like Jack Bross's suggestion - I've been getting lots of spam from Nigerian scam artists lately, and I just pasted a standard rejection header back at them, though they might be smart enough to figure it's from me, not my provider. Not that Nigerians sam at all - just lots of fake $100 bills I saw myself at the World Cup at foxboro, MA back in 1994. Nothing to see here. |
| Posted by: Raj 2002-08-26 20:54:36 |
| #3 I use MailWasher and I find it allows me to bounce the spam back right from the server. It seems to work great and its free, or you can pay $20.00 and get life-time upgrade. I think it is well worth the $20 bucks. The address is http://www.mailwasher.net/ I think it will do the job you want. Jack |
| Posted by: Jack Bross 2002-08-26 14:59:27 |
| #2 Remind me not to mail you from my yahoo address! Seriously, spam is a major annoyance, but I've got some pretty good filters running on my site address. I've also got a 'whitelist' of addresses that always get through, which helps with the occasional badly-titled e-mail. |
| Posted by: Kathy K 2002-08-26 14:16:00 |
| #1 Yeah, I've had someone use my email address/name to spam people with. Very very annoying. Personally, I fiter stuff by subject in Outlook. If a message contains a word like "Printer Ink" or "Viagra" or anything involving animals & sex, it gets deleted off the server. Sure, there's a chance someone I know will send me a email with a subject like that, but pretty unlikely (and I likely wouldn't want to read it to begin with). |
| Posted by: Jeremy 2002-08-26 12:50:14 |