OT; need ISP with filter on mailbox input

I can't use my e-mail any more because the mailbox fills with junk (spam) within an hour after I empty it, and it takes 10 min to empty it.

I need a new ISP that has filters on the INPUT side of the mailbox so I can prevent spam from filling it. Especially a filter that can discard attachments (especially .exe attachments). Filtering on the senders e-mail address is obviously worthless, I need filtering based on the headers, both FROM and SUBJECT. What ISP offers such filters?

I have no trouble limiting downloading from the mailbox or filtering the spam after downloading, but that does no good if the mailbox is full and I can't get the mail I want.

Any help appreciated. I have to dump mindspring/earth link because of this problem and would like to have a stable ISP.

Reply to
nick hull
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We really like Mail Armory from Frii (Front Range Internet). Frii is in Colorado; it turns out we can access our account just fine from Maine. So one way to do it is to pay Frii for an account (Mail Armory comes with it) and also pay a local ISP. Not optimal.

I'm pretty sure you can sign up to have Mail Armory filter your mail for much less. See the second link below.

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Mail Armory allows you to set a filtering level, black lists and white lists (never/always let through). The stuff classed as spam is left on the server in a special section. You can review it on a web page and delete as you choose. After a time period you set, it goes away if undeleted.

Steve Smith

nick hull wrote:

Reply to
Steve Smith

I feel the same way. I don't understand why Earthlink isn't blocking this SWEN Shit. I just leave Eudora running all the time. Every 5 minutes it downloads the latest batch of junk. It does seem to be diminishing though.

2 days ago I woke up with 800 of them in my junk mailbox. Yesterday I was down to 600. Today there was only 450.
Reply to
Ernie Leimkuhler

Good luck! I just spoke with my ISP about the problems of the Microsoft mass mailings. (I know it's not MS but rather some little turd who has more brains than guts) I'm now having to go to the server to delete this mess. I ask if it were possible for them or I to set a filter on the main mail server for my address and was more or less laughed at.

The only advice they could offer was to set up filters on my computer (already done) and get use to the idea that this MS thing wasn't going away. I was also told that if my mailbox is full then any further messages would simply be turned away. I suggested to the tech the only way they were going to set up filters was when the damn internet came crashing down due clogged up Microsoft emails floating around on the net and it was too late.

Perhaps I'm wrong but this MS virus emailing thing seems to be a fast moving problem that has no end in sight and with the ISP tech's words of get use to it, I suspect the whole she-bang is getting ready to drop like a rock until the ISP's grow some balls and go after the little bastard who started this. I don't typically worry about viruses and figure most will go away in a few weeks after they run their course but this seems to be getting worst by the day. I normally don't run around waiting for the sky to fall but I damn sure think the web is going start dropping pretty soon.

(RANT OFF) As to ISP's who offer server level filters to be set by the customer, I can't help you there but like you, I starting to search for another since mine is of no help. Rusty Bates

Reply to
Rusty Bates

I work for an ISP that provides this service. We call it 'email gaurd' and it's sold as an additional service. Now, we are an Alaska based company

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so it's likely that we won't be the best choice for most of you...

You can get this service from a company called Postini as well.

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is the webside I believe.

I don't recall the cost, but I think GCI charges an extra $1 a month (maybe it's $2 a month). For me, well worth it.

Bill in Alaska

Reply to
bob

Hey Guys,

I've been using the <

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for the past four days. Effective, but a bit slow to use when the stream of "MS" hits was high.

I got that mail2web suggested from the regular tech support guys at my ISP, but that's all they said they could do for me. But yesterday I made a third call and I insisted they should help more, and so I got to speak to the Technical Services Manager and asked him what they could do about it. He immediately looked at what I was getting and said they would write to two of the suspect ISP's of the "Senders" and ask them to contact their customer and ask him to seek help to get rid of the problem. One is in Ireland apparently.

Interesting that I only get hit on the e-dress I use for modeleng-list (primarily) and a few other user groups, but I see lots of YAK here on RCM about others having the same troubles.

Anyway, point in writing is that this morning, about 6 hours after the last mail2web "cleaning", I only had about 50 to delete, and an hour later, I only had 10, and almost an hour later (when I started this reply), I only had ONE!!! And after this few minutes of typing, I just checked and I have NO messages!! Is this co-incidental, or is the virus or what-ever receding??

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Reply to
Brian Lawson

Hi Nick,

I see from your email address that you are using Mindspring/Earthlink. Earthlink DOES have filters on the server, called SpamBlocker. Do you have it activated?

The SpamBlocker has to be turned on, you must go to Earthlink.net, and login and go to the Webmail area. There are levels of protection you can set:

Known Spam Blocking (Medium Protection): They have spam filters that divert suspicious mail into a Suspect Mail Folder, which cleans itself out automatically every few days. You can look in there to see if anything gets mistakenly sent there. This works reasonably well.

Suspect Mail and Known Spam Blocking (High Protection): Blocks EVERYONE except those people in your address book. If someone not in your address book tries to email you, they get an email alerting them to the fact that they have been blocked. To get unblocked, they have to solve some simple puzzle (ie what is the sum of the two numbers in the box). If they solve the puzzle, THEN you get an email that says so-and-so is asking to be added to your address book. Otherwise no email goes into your mailbox. This Challenge Response blocks out ALL the automated spam, so far only a human can find the number in the box. Right now, this pretty much solves the spam problem. It's a little bit of a hassle because you have to make sure you're address book is up-to-date. I use this and I get NO SPAM.

I believe that a good deal of your problem stems from the fact that you are using Eudora or Outlook or something with a dialup connection, and that you have to waste time downloading all the garbage and attachments before you can do anything about it.

To help with this you can check your mail with your browser from anywhere, by going to Earthlink.net logging in and using their Webmail, it works just like Hotmail or Yahoo. You see message headers and you only read emails that you want to read, nothing gets downloaded unless you want to.

Or you could try Mailwasher, its free, it basically does the same thing, it allows you to look at message headers in your mailbox without downloading anything. You only read those emails that you want. It has some sort of spam filtering algorithm, maintains blacklinsts and whitelists, has filters, and will automatically delete (and Bounce if you want) garbage. It works pretty well also.

I think your problem should be manageable without changing ISP's. I am very happy with Eathlink's Spam Blocker. Oh BTW I don't work for Earthlink, its just that changing ISP's can be a pain. The Mailwasher works good too. A friend works for AOL, and explained to me how they also have filters on their servers and how sophisticated they are. But do you really want to go there?

Hope this helps, good luck.

Art

Reply to
Walt Hartung

i am using the Earthlink spam blocker on the full setting but at 143K to

156K per message the box can only hold about 120 messages. The volume of spams is so high that I get a message that my box is full every couple of hours. Then I have to go to webmail and scan the whole mess looking for the 1 or 2 real messages before trashing the other 119.

How do you get past the simi-comouter literate first l> Hi Nick,

Reply to
Glenn Ashmore

My ISP just started using Postini as well. I just wish it had more controls on what it does to stuff.

Wayne Cook Shamrock, TX

Reply to
Wayne Cook

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 05:38:19 -0500, REMOVE snipped-for-privacy@means.net (Don Wilkins) wrote something ......and in reply I say!:

Hang on. I can see the long term possible benefits of what you are suggesting, _IF_ the moron spammers get the hint in the end that NOBODY IS LISTENING!.....hhhrmph..sorry.

But are you saying that for every email that you receive that is not on your white list, you send one back, and unless your reply is then replied to, you refuse the email?

In the short term I see that this is going to create even _more_ traffic, if you are being spammed heavily.

I could see it working if the ISP did this, assuming they receive an email that is one for them, but instructs their server to send to all customers. I am not sure if this is how it works.

I am not "having a go". I am genuinely interested.

****************************************************************************************** Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. The rest sit around and make snide comments.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email !!

Reply to
Old Nick

No. The confirmation request is done automatically by the ISP so the person who initiated the email to me gets a request for confirmation that they did send that email. All the original emailer needs to do is hit reply and send. I do not see the reply to the confirmation request. The email arrives normally. Now if the original sender waits a couple days before sending the confirmation there will be an obvious delay in delivery.

I will not see that email that Mr. Nichols initiated but didn't think it was important enough to confirm. If he didn't think it was important enough to confirm then I probably won't miss it. If I send an email to someone not on my white list I place a code word in my email with instructions to leave it in any reply. That code word in incoming email bypasses the confirmation request so the email is delivered normally.

It certainly is not perfect but it sure cuts the spam.

It may create more traffic in the sense that there is a return email sent to the sender but my junk mail went from over 100 per day to almost zero.

The junk mail is stored on the ISP for seven days. I can take a look at that stuff and delete or forward anything that is held on the server the program.

I hope I explained it better this time.

You might give that

POP3 Scan Mailbox

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a try. It is free and looks pretty good.

Reply to
Don Wilkins

Nick, I suspect that your email address has been out there so long, every spam bot on the planet has your number. The best spam defense may be to change email addresses often. A comprimise would be to have a private email that you never post anywhere and an oft-changed public email address for use in newsgroups and filling out web-forms, shopping, etc. You can get a Yahoo address for free. A long term solution that affords a lot of flexibillity might be to get your own domain ($20 a year and $5 a month gets you a domain with pop3 email) Getting your own domain makes it easy to manage email and seemlessly change addresses. The address I use to post here is legit, no need to remove anything to email me. I use it for all web forms, etc. Once it gets too much spam, I'll change it to something else and set up an autoresponder to notify folks of the change. This way my real email address doesn't get harvested. My domain host (Tierranet.com) has some great filtering options. Stuff gets filtered out and/or rejected long before it clogs my mailbox. It has options for signing up with various data bases that identify known open relays and spam sources and rejecting those emails. You can save filtered email to see if anything legitimate was accidentally filtered. Once you tweak the settings to where no legit stuff is filtered, you can opt to not save a copy of filtered mail. Best of all, since you own the domain, you can keep changing email addresses with some sense of continuity. Since spam bots had a strangle hold on my former email address, I simply changed it and set up an auto responder on the old address that alerts folks to the change. I have seen no increase in spam recently (not that I wasn't getting a lot to begin with) since most of the emails would be rejected outright based on blind carbon copy or verified open relay. My old email address currently gets nearly all the spam sent to my domain. It used to be posted on the website. I don't do that anymore with the new one (I spell it out so that the spam bots can't harvest it) So far so good!

Regards, Dave

Reply to
Dave Ficken
[ ... ]

I have seen some such confirmation requests which assume that all correspondents are using HTML-capable e-mail programs, and I will

*not* do so, for various security reasons, as well as far preferring the better features in my unix-based e-mail programs. [ ... ]

If I answer a usenet request for help or information, I normally use the newsgroup unless there appears to be a need for a quick response via e-mail -- e.g. if you are proposing to do something which is likely to damage your machine.

If the challenge/response is required, it eliminates the speed advantage, and you are likely to see the newsgroup copy before I could get the e-mail confirmed. And I *don't* feel like jumping through hoops to do *you* a favor.

And -- as above, it cuts some valid e-mail as well. As I mentioned, mailing list managers *hate* the challenge-response systems, and many will automatically drop a subscriber whose address returns a challenge. (They have better things to do than to continually be responding to challenges.)

That is good for *you* -- but what about the rest of the net?

And how likely are you to do this? For that matter -- how big would a seven-day run of the current virus be? How would you find anything which you might want in the middle of that -- given that your challenge-response host's bandwidth is a lot more than your system is likely to have. There have been people getting thousands of copies per

*day* of the Swen worm. (Or does it just delete virii without the quarantine?

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

And I *also* post it to the newsgroup -- with simply a "Cc: " for the original poster.

As do I -- but propagation speed on usenet is *very* variable. I may see something within a half hour of it being posted, or it may take as much as two weeks. (And I've got a pretty good feed, as they go.) The e-mail version normally gets there much quicker (a minute or two) unless blocked by a challenge/response system or something similar.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 07:26:20 -0500, REMOVE snipped-for-privacy@means.net (Don Wilkins) wrote something ......and in reply I say!:

OK. Thanks. I have no doubt of the benefit to you as the user

As I said, there would be a double gain if the sdpammers use some sort of technique that simply sends a message to the ISP's server, which propagates itself throughout the server's customers.

I suppose if we doubled every spam message the crash would come sooner and something real would be done about it!

I ask all this not because I am having trouble (I was, but my ISP has excellent protection of me, via their mail watcher) but because I am going to ask them what their setup is in detail, and wanted to knw what else was out there. This spm/virus thing really is getting up my nose, even though I am not personally hit hard. My concern is for the Web. Messianic complex strikes again!

Reply to
Old Nick

And lo, it came about, that on Thu, 25 Sep 2003 10:52:51 -0400 in rec.crafts.metalworking , Glenn Ashmore was inspired to utter:

I've been using Eudora. One option already ticked is to not download files larger than 40k in size. I added a filter to delete from the serve and send to the trash anything which got blocked because it was "too large". (this filter came after the "whitelist".

Then I got mailwasher. Basically, everything which isn't "TO Me" gets dumped. Down side, I don't know how much spam I'm deleting (it maxed out at

1940 in one day using just Eudora.)
Reply to
pyotr filipivich

You must be on Cingular's GSM network. It is seriously fubared. Apparently a virus penetrated their network control computers.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

Unfortunately you have to manually operate mailwasher to delete the spams. That means that if you are not at your computer and running mailwasher before your mailbox fills up (and at 1-2 150K spams per minute, that's just hours) your ISP will start bouncing your e-mails. Deleting all the stuff that isn't "TO" the right address is good, but you have to deal with mailing lists if you subscribe to any, as well as newsletters and other requested mass-mailings.

BTW, The company responded very quickly to an inquiry about making this (they call it "Process Mail") automatic, but unfortunately it's only under discussion there.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

And lo, it came about, that on Mon, 29 Sep 2003 11:21:26 GMT in rec.crafts.metalworking , Spehro Pefhany was inspired to utter:

I wasn't aware of that, but it "makes sense". ANd it is also a bit of a relief. I shut the computer down for a two day trip rather than leave it up and lose any real mail it thought was "spam".

tschus pyotr

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

[ ... ]

Hmm ... "in a box" suggests that this is an HTML message. I don't (and won't) read e-mail with anything capable of processing HTML, there are too many nasties which can be snuck through by that, so I would not see the box, and thus could not solve the puzzle.

And -- you also may not get some valid e-mail as well, thanks to the way this apparently depends on HTML. (Anything with HTML in it will most likely wind up in my "purgatory" mailbox (probably spam), and if there are a lot of spam there (e.g. the thirteen to eighteen which are commonly there at my first logon of the day) unless the subject line or the from line is *obviously* non spam (and there are very few which are so obvious these days) it will probably just get processed and added to my blocklists.

My Bayseian filters have been trained on the normal and spam e-mail which I have received, and since I don't normally get valid HTML e-mail, but spam very often has HTML, and virii often have specific features (e.g. the "iframe" tag) which enables automatic infection of systems using unpatched version of Outlook Express), it has learned that those are things to block, too.

There is such a thing as being *too* protected from spam. :-) Challenge-response systems are a step over that line IMHO. (And, in the opinion of many who manage valid mailing lists, who will drop any subscriber who turns on a challenge-response system without whitelisting out the mailing list address. No such list manager has the time to deal with the potential hundreds or thousands of challenge-response requests, so the simple answer is -- "If the subscriber doesn't whitelist the mailing list to which he has subscribed, he *will* be dropped."

Good Luck, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

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