OT - Spam Emails via Website

We paid for Mailwasher Pro, and while it does enable a fair bit of cleaning and bouncing of emails, we also found as you did, that it failed to actually slow down the flood, so we ditched it in the end.

It is useful for spotting large and obvious virus emails before you get them into your machine, and more than once I have had a 1mb download on the server which I have been able to delete first, saving me a lot of time waiting for it to come down.

Sadly, we seem to have abandoned all the preventative stuff in favour of good old-fashioned eyeball vigilance, and a once-a-week check over with an anti-virus programme to make sure we have nothing nasty on board.

I should also say that Easynet has implemented a spam removal service for all its customers who want it, and that has eleminated 98% of what we used to get. Now we get a couple or so each day. I think this will become more commonplace as time goes by, more ISP's will include this basic service for free as part of the package. Ours is a paid-for service BTW, it may not happen on the freebie carriers.

Peter

Hi David, I found "Spampal" was very effective especially when I added the Bayesian filter. It was catching 99% of spam. (About 200 a day) Then after a bit of advice I changed my E Mail address. The secret is to then change your address on newsgroups to snipped-for-privacy@unusual.com. Someone has provided the unusual.com address for this purpose & doesn't read it. I now only get about 2 spam a week instead of 200 a day. If anyone wants my address just ask on the list & I will send it.

-- Dave Croft Warrington England

Map Map

David, I still struggle on with mailwasher, but it does nothing, as Peter says, to reduce the tide. It does allow you to delete spam on the ISP's computer before painfully downloading it all (it allows you to read the headers). I'll be trying Dave's suggestion tomorrow.

I get the impression that most of my spam is triggered by posting here, sadly.

It seems to me that the ISPs need to deal with this problem ASAP, before the net is clogged with the damn stuff. Far more of what I receive is spam rather than mail I want.

Regards, Arthur G

Bayesian filter.

snipped-for-privacy@unusual.com.

Mailwasher

experience of

Unless you use your web site for business purposes it would help if you remove the "click to email" link from it. Having suffered an avalanche of spam because my addresses had been harvested from my various sites, for some time now I have used an image with the address on it (see this link)

Sadly such a solution makes anyone wishing to contact you jump through hoops, but it is effective. spam bots are unable to harvest it and I have not seen one unwanted message sent to that address.

MailWasher can be very effective, it all depends on how it is set up, rather than go into great detail here I would be happy to discuss the settings via email. (the address I use here is a working one) The bounce feature of MailWasher is it's least useful feature, it's misuse exacerbates the spam problem and could lead to a users ISP taking disciplinary action. By far the largest percentage of spam is sent using forged headers, in some cases the address used by the spammer will be that of an innocent party. If they are new users, they will likely delete the false bounce massage, but it is far more likely the spammer will use a real address as revenge against someone who is anti-spam, in such a case they will not be fooled and depending on the severity of the problem caused they might be inclined to report such abuse to the appropriate ISP. I have had it happen to me and the offenders were Larted with extreme prejudice. Even if the forged domain is fictitious flooding an ISPs postmasters box with bounces back to bogus undeliverable addresses could lead to action being taken.

I too struggled on with mailwasher for some time but eventually ditched it in favour of Cloudmark.com which puts all the mail it recognises as Spam (it seemed to find far more real Spam than mailwasher) in to a Spam folder as soon as the messages are downloaded). Cloudmark has a big database that compares all your incoming mail with the database and every time you "block" a new Spam mail, it is added to the database. Problem is that the spammers are getting cleverer and change the headers, text etc to try and foil the antispam applications.

One interesting fact is that I have not disabled the "mail to" function on my website which has been running for over 4 years now but I get virtually no Spam at all. Conversely, I have a BTOpenworld account which I have NEVER used (and only keep it as it is an easily remembered address) and I get in excess of two hundred a day, of which around 80% is filtered by the BTOpenworld web email site (which you can set up on line) and a further 10% are recognised by Cloudmark. but the fact is, all the Spam must be generated by software that "tries" all possibilities and when the mail does not come back, it marks the account as a "good Spam" account.

Of course, it is all in our mind really as sending Spam is illegal now in Europe, isn't it....................

How much actually orginates in the EU or USA?

I also use Mail washer and don't bounce the mail back as I'm sure the automated list can't care one bit. I have noticed that after starting with mail washer the spam has actually increased. I also use Agent as a news reader and email. I noticed that the Cloud mark product above seems to only be of IE. Can this run with agent?

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

If you trace back to who benefits most are in the USA.

Expecting a deluge of spam when I started using NG a couple of years ago, I set up a hotmail address as a 'throwaway'. Touch wood, the deluge has not materialised and of the half dozen or so a day I do get, most are successfully placed in junk folder. I now use hotmail almost exclusively, and indeed have just moved from the free service to £20 a year 'extra storage' option so now you lot can send me nice piccies without my inbox overflowing.

OTOH with my work email, which appears on company website, spam outnumbers legitimate emails 10 to 1, and that doesn't include the stuff which is filtered out by Norton internet security pro.

BTW it's a shame that some of the longest threads on this NG lately have concerned the pitfalls of usage rather than anything to do with engines - sign of the times and a still emerging technology I suppose.

As at least 99% of spammers headers are forged that is very wise.

By the time that you need a program like MailWasher your address is on a vast amount of "Genuine opted-in gagging for it" lists. By using the filters, DNS blacklist and your own black list you can set MailWasher so that you will only see email that you actually want. The latest version has a stats section which allows you to retrieve anything that might not have made it past the filters.

John, No, Cloudmark only works with Outlook and they now have a beta version for Outlook Express but sadly not for Agent.

Interesting thread - I too used MailWasher, but it was more trouble than it was worth as I still had to go through the junk to make sure I didn't miss anything. I thought I was getting more spam, but wasn't sure - now, though, the comment here makes me so! Serves me right for responding to a spammed message - what did I expect? ;o))

I'm hotlinked to the Regia website as principal contact, so get too many business and "new member" mails to be able to set the bar very high and dropped out in the first 30 days, so it didn't cost me owt.

I now philosiphically delete my way through at least 100 a day, but it isn't onerous, really, just another boring little task to do in the morning like polishing your shoes or cleaning your teeth!

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

It's far more trying when you only own 3 pairs of shoes and seven teeth

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

From 31 October 2003, EU legislation 2003/58/EC and further information can be found at the following URL

Some interesting figures. In April 2001, it was estimated that "only" 7 percent of global email traffic was spam, however, by August 2003, spam was estimated to be 50 percent!!!!

Thanks for all the responses, general consensus seems to say that apart from avoiding downloading messgaes Mailwasher is pretty useless !

Your idea of making the email address as an image is a great idea and one which I am away to work on presently! I fear however that as I have started getting spam to this account the address is in 'spam circulation' and it may get worse.

Can anyone enlighten me on the 'unusual.com' system mentioned ? I am going to try Spampal to see if it makes any difference.

Will let you know how I get on ! David

-- Stationary Engines Scotland

out for the Spamtrap !

Personally, I find our own "'m..." quite refreshing for my inbox. A free trial version of 'm... is available at

Maybe this is of some interest. Demon now has implemented a spam filtering service. I was getting approx. 100 of these nuisance e-mails a day, now it is down to just 5. Pretty good going? The good thing about their service is that the spam does not even reach my PC. I had tried Mailwasher but I couldn't set it up with Demons Turnpike connect program.

In message , David McC writes

In message , John R Taylor writes

John,

Mailwasher works fine with Turnpike. The new Demon service has certainly worked wonders with spam elimination, I was running at around 150 daily and now down to negligible numbers. However, I've just started to get around 100 Mydoom virii over each of the last couple of days which Demon aren't filtering yet. At least they're easy to spot and delete with Mailwasher.

Wassail!