53A Models - contact emails

Before you give up you may want to consider an account at

they remove spam from your inbox on a regular basis. They offer a free

1 month trial and have just expanded their filtering to filter out mail sent to non-existent addresses, which is usefull to people like me whose e-mail address is being used by spammers to send spam. I can't recommend them enough.

Chris

I presume you have installed mailwasher? (mailwasher.com) a good free spam remover

"Chris Packman" wrote

I stopped using my old email address on Friday and have not had one single piece of spam or virus email since. By not openly broadcasting the email address I'm now using I hope to keep the problem under control without spam controls.

Thanks for your advice, however, just choosing a different way of (hopefully) solving the problem.

John.

Hi Chris,

For a similar UK-based service see also

I've been using them for over 12 months now. No viruses, and only an occasional spam gets through. Great peace of mind and the time saved each month is well worth the low cost.

EMF are normally faster than spamache who advertise a

10-minute clearance. EMF times vary according to the time of day and email traffic. But they normally clear your inbox every 3-5 minutes, and at less busy times it is usually only 1-2 minutes.

There's also a webmail option using your normal email address. And full access to your spam and virus logs, if you ever need convincing that it's worth having!

regards,

Martin.

---------- email: snipped-for-privacy@templot.com web:

Hi John

Bad luck. I've resorted to SAPROXY (a windows version of the best spam killoer around: spam assassin)

Can I suggest you put a signature on your posts, including your website?

You should also take a look at what the defaults are for bad addresses at your website. For example, if I email to nonsensical snipped-for-privacy@53amodels.co.uk, does the email end up in your mailbox as default? Spammers are increasingly using random addresses at known domains to annoy admins in this way.

Regards

Mike snipped-for-privacy@removethis.wonham.com

"Michael" wrote

I need to see who every email is from and at least examine the subject line, so spam killers are not for me. I get a lot of emails from various Yahoo groups which have similar subject lines which could also potentially get weeded out as spam. If I've got to check each email before deleting same I might as well check it on my browser as on the email server.

I do, but only on new threads which I start. I don't think everyone wants to see my signature on every posting I make. Also I suspect that repeat posting of website addresses adds to the amount of spam being sent to such domain names. I'll add my signature to this posting, so you will see how I'm trying to get around this issue. Any comments will be appreciated.

No - that would get binned - only very specific email aliases are accepted. That's why I was able to discontinue the snipped-for-privacy@53amodels.karoo.co.uk email address.

Hi John,

EMF keep a log of all your stopped emails, which you can view on their web site. The spam log shows date, sender and subject line, reason for the stop, and a release button. I check through my EMF spam log once a week. In the 12 months that I have been using EMF I have found 2 genuine emails out of a total of 3036 spam emails stopped, released them to my inbox and warned the sender that their email address is on spam black lists.

There have been about a dozen others which looked as though they might possibly be genuine, but when released and received turned out to be spam - in other words the EMF system knows better than I do!

As for EMF failures, i.e. spams which get through the net, there are about 2 a day, usually the Nigerian million dollar scams. I could stop even those by changing my EMF settings to include sender-verification, but I have found that that can sometimes cause delays to genuine emails.

In the same time my anti-virus (McAfee VirusScan Online, which updates itself every 4 hours automatically) has never fired once, and my EMF virus log is currently showing 474 viruses stopped. (These emails can't be released.) That averages more than one virus a day over the full year, although the rate has increased considerably recently. A year ago it was only about one virus a week.

The beauty of the system is that all this stuff never even reaches your computer, so email downloads are faster and you can read your email in relaxed fashion without any nagging worries or constant deletes and filter setting changes. The cost is nothing compared to the time saved.

Just a well satisfied user of

and happy to quote my email address below.

Martin.

---------- email: snipped-for-privacy@templot.com web:

(etc)

That's probably overkill, there is no real need to make it more difficult for people it visit. Spiders could find your website anyway. The site in my sig gets a suprising number of visits from newgroup postings, and very little, if any, spam to the address on it.

Or maybe the spammers know I don't need to make it any larger or need their herbal help ;-)

"Ken Taylor" wrote

OK, so I'll change the address, although I did try emailing that address some time ago and it *bounced*.

John.

Is this better?

"Ken Taylor" wrote

OK, so I'll use snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid but who in their right mind would associate any email address with *nospam*.

John.

Except the spamming bastards now strip out the ".invalid"

I have a special address (spamdump@mydomain) which goes to dev/null, I set the address in postings to (usually) snipped-for-privacy@microsoft.com - seems fair to me! - and I use a reply-to address; fewer spammers harvest these (although some do). I then send mail initially to an account at spamcop.net, which scans it for spam and forwards it to my own domain. At which point it's scanned again, by a virus checker and SpamAssassin. This reduces the number of actual spams I get down to "only" one or two per day.

But whatever you do you won't stop Swen and its variants because this will use the address book of infected machines to send you mail - so if anybody has your email address and picks up the virus, they'll distribute it right back to you.

The fact that Microsoft still haven't fixed this vulnerability despite knowing about it for at least five years indicates that (a) they can't or (b) they don't care. My money's on (c) - both of the above.

For best results clean the Windows virus from your PC and load Linux ;-)

That's why I'm using snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid - they can strip the invalid all they like, but any emails trawled from here won't now affect me (I hope).

Certainly doing this has had an impact on my inbox. From a high of 270 Swen infected emails in one day to none for a whole week seems a big iomprovement to me.

I'll cross the infected address book bridge again when needs be.

John.

I know what you mean. I use snipped-for-privacy@microsoft.com for similar reasons :-)

It is of course safe to publish for example "guy dot chapman at spamcop dot net" spelling it out, on a newsgroup or your web page. Your web page is a very likely source of your address gettign out, BTW, more likely than Usenet. You can get round that by encoding all non-alpha characters using HTML glyphs as I did here:

Lesley@prms-eur-ug.demon.co.uk

This works as a mail-to link but confounds the spammers because the keyword "mailto:" and the atmark don't show up in their web crawlers.