how to stop unwanted spam?????

[simdeb]

can any body suggest anything apart from swapping our email address??? i can cope with 'normal' spam but they are getting really rude and annoying we just delete them but on average get around 30 40 a day.  went away for 3 nights and come home to 187 spam all of the rude description.  just wondered if any one new about any web site out there

Debbie

[denviks]

they are definatly getting worse these days... i am open minded but holy you knw what  :shock:  :shock:  :shock:

[simdeb]

just been on gmails help page and found this

How do I get rid of spam?

To remove spam from your inbox, check the box next to the unwanted message, and click Report Spam. If you discover a message is spam once you have opened it, just click Report Spam along the top of the message to send it to the Gmail Team.

The more spam you mark, the better our system will get at weeding out those annoying messages. If you or we should happen to goof and mark a good message as spam, click Not Spam at the top of the message. You can also click Undo immediately after marking a message as spam, to remove the Spam label.

* Check out spam protection as you have never seen it before. Gmail Theater presents an ensemble cast of engineers in Attack Of The Spam. Watch the video on YouTube. *

so will try this

[datalas]

Hmm...

In terms of anti-spam measures I have a reasonably vicious set ...  last month I got a grand total of ...

259,402 spam emails....

I think that could be construed as being a shade excessive

[Evilgoat]

Welcome to the net :(

A good proportion of Datalas's total are mine as well :(

[graham]

I add them to my blocked senders list.

[Mark_Solesbury]

I find Gmails spam trap really good.

I also use thunderbird which is supposed to have some learning algorithm in it to learn what is spam and not.

I dont really get any any more.

You can manually log onto Gmail and check the spam folder, if something is in there that you want, click the 'Not Spam' folder.

If however you are using Outlook Express, you can set up some rules.

Firstly, if you receive a lot of mail that you are CC'd in this wont work - You can set up a rule to say 'If To does not contain "your mail address" then delete. Most spam gets cc'd to everyone.

Second, you can stop the blank senders one by a sneaky rule that is 'If To does not contain A or E or I or O or U then delete' or something like that.

If you dont get a lot of normal mail, add all your friends to your address book. This then becomes like a white list, and you can do a rule to say ' if From is not in my address book then delete'

Its all about how much you hate spam really!

[thermidorthelobster]

If you're using a service like google mail, they should have reasonably proficient spam filtering already.  I get very little spam through gmail.

If you are accessing your email through software like Outlook, you can get plug-in spam filters which you can train to spot spam specific to you.  I use Apple's Mail application which has built-in spam filtering which works well.

By combining gmail's spam filtering and Apple Mail's, I get spam coming through to my inbox maybe once every few days.  If you're tempted to change email addresses, think about using gmail, and if you're going to stick to an ISP email address, tell us what application you use to access your email and somebody can suggest a spam filter.

[datalas]

Welcome to the net :(

A good proportion of Datalas's total are mine as well :(

Nope,  yours don't go anywhere near that relay :)  That's just me and some of mud-club....

[carbore]

If you are a business of say 6 or more then Id recommend MESSAGELABS. We used to have tons of spam, now we get hardly any. Its not inexpensive, but as our consultants are fairly well paid, if we spend time reading spam it racks up time-money fairly quickly.

If you are a home user then you need some form of aplication or filter. Tehre is no pint adding the sender to blocked, brcuase the sender email is random and probly the person before you who also got spam.  Some semi-spam will be removed, but thats more likely to be mailing list stuff thats you may have inadvertently signed up to.

Spam filters work in a few main ways (afar as I know)

Email sent form (not very reliable)
IP sent form (bit more reliable as it uses lists of know servers used for spam relay)
Heuristics, this is a clever way of determining if its spam based on content, eg, lots of rude words etc.  More reliable but depends gratley on the individual provider.
Word Filters. Cheap and cheerful, e.g. if the mail contains v*agra then block it.
Heuristics and Word filters can be got round by simply sending the content as a graphic.

Stuff based at your ISP (or mesgae labs) is clever as it uses all of the above then cross references it so is very up to date.

If you change your email address remeber to.

Pick something irrelevant possibly with a number in the middle.
Dont post your address anywhere.

[Evilgoat]

Carbore - Its a little bit more complex than that, well actually a lot :)

A major line of my employers business is Anti-Spam and its a never ending arms race. You are more likeley to get spannered if you publish your address anywhere on the net including here. Sign up to stuff on the net, CC a lot of these chain mails and joke mails and have mates who cant secure their system.

Webmail systems are abovious targets too so moving to one a little less known should help.

Messagelabs bring their own issues, not least they were in the news more than a few times a couple of months ago for some scary screw-ups.

Go search for them on Theregister.co.uk

[strapping young lad]

i have a simple way of avoiding spam as much as i can

1) have a "public" email address where you would use to register on websites, is web-based (for two reasons.. one so it doesnt clog your pc, and second so anything malicious doesnt make its way to you)

2) have a "me" email address to which you would give to, say mates, employers, cv, family, that kind of thing... i know this isnt foolproof as your mates, etc will have you email address in their address book, and if they get trojanned or whatever it is, your email address will be picked up.


as i said it aint foolproof but it works for me

i use hotmail or point 1. and gmail for point 2 (as its got a decent spam removal tool too, plus it can be used as a pop account to download to outlook

[SteveGoodz]

If you're accessing your email through a client application (e.g. Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc) then I highly recommend Mailwasher (www.firetrust.com). This looks at your inbox(es) and classifies emails as spam or okay and can delete the spam before it is downloaded to your pc. There are black and white lists so you can add friends, etc., and their mails are always accepted as okay. The program also links into Spamcop and uses their database to find emails from known spammers.

I get about 80 spam emails per day and Mailwasher correctly recognises about 97% and I can't remember the last time it incorrectly tagged a good email as bad.

HTH  :D

[Manicminer]

I haven't had any spam for about 18 months