Spam Free??

hi G. try a program called mail washer it allows you to look at your emails on the server and delete them or accept them before downloading them into your outlook program. find it here.

I have accounts setup that are never used (honeypots) and they get spammed. The spammers are funded by the results of their work just like you and I are funded on the results of our work. I have spam filters at the ISP on my accounts. I have to regularly go through them to find legitimate emails that get caught there and unblock them. Even with that there are many emails that get through the filters. There are so many ways to spell V***gra that a spam filter just can't cope.

Most people have habits that fuel the spam industry. My favorite bad practice is forwarding or sending email with a list of addresses either in the body or in the To: field instead of the BCC: field. Just one user in the recieving chain has to get "harvested" by a trojan and every email on the list is now in the spammer's hopper when BCC is not used.

If PGP had caught on as a mainstream tool spam would have been greatly reduced or eliminated. For example if I posted my public key on every post to the NG and used a specific email account for NG purposes I could trash any email coming in to that account that wasn't signed and that would be end of story. I would also have a way to verify the sender. For example, does SW have a public key that we can use to verify emails, surveys, etc. from them? Does your VAR have a public key? Nope.

ZoneAlarm has a very good email filter to keep out trojans, worms and virii. So do other vendors. Even in an internal network a good firewall can be a big help.

Using Outlook for email is another spam promoter. Use several different email programs. When it comes to this subject diversity is better.

I screen email on a web based email interface before downloading if possible. A lot of the junk never makes it into my network.

And even with all that I have had to shut down email accounts that were killed by spam.

Some other SPAM reducing tips: Don't use your real e-mail address on public newsgroups such as this. Address harvesters go through these groups and collect them. That is why you will see someone post their address with items embedded that they tell you to remove when you reply to them. Watch what "free" things you sign up for on the internet. Nothing is free, and often you end up giving spammers your e-mail address. Reputable companies don't do this, but watch some of the shareware/freeware sites, and many of the contests.

Ken,

So how are things in Pella?

In my case I use a real email address. Yes it gets spammed but the filters get most of it. Even if you fake it like you do it is still possible to find out where a post originates and if it is for a company IP that IP will likely get spammed though I don't know the details of how it is done. If you are on one of the big internet providers whether a monster like comcast or a smaller phone company operation you will likely get spammed whether you reveal your email or not.

I totally agree that indiscriminantly revealling an email address to anyone that asks is boneheaded.

We recently ran into an spam problem we traced to a particular employee whose machine was compromised. We narrowed it to him based on who in the company was getting spammed and his email names list. In the spam world you don't want to be on too many lists. Unfortunately you will be on the list of anyone you have sent email to.

ken wrote:

Until recently I was using MailWasher, it is a good program but does still requires a lot of work. I have been trialing Spam Arrest

Email addresses were on my very large whitelist (that was created from MailWasher and Outlook) don't get challenged and are completely oblivious to my using Spam Arrest.

If you read the online reviews there are some negatives about using challenge / response email filters. The only problems I've had so far, are when getting automated responses when signing up for newsletters or when purchasing good on the internet. It's easy to overcome this particular issue, just log on to the Spam Arrest account and go into the "unverified" section and authorize the senders.

Spam Arrest offers a 30 day free trial, I have since signed up, and paid, for 6 months. However I consider this to be an extend trial period until totally convinced.

John Layne

Things are good. Busy, but good.

I'm not worried about the person who tries to find out what your e-mail address is, but rather the harvesting software that can go through all usenet groups and posts on a server and pull anything that looks like an e-mail address. Then it ends up on a e-mail address list that is sold to every spammer under the sun! And yes, I still get spam. Filters do get most of it though, but some still gets through. My blocked senders list has got to be a mile long by now.

My point was (buried there somewhere) that they don't even need your email address. Just a domain will do the trick.

other software that some others were kind enough to mention, and it seems that there was nothing to gain, in that the manual work was about the same as what I need to do in Outlook, Spamarrest is definitely worth a try.

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