Spam used to be a tinned meat

[The Voice]

Hey all.

After following sage advice from this here site, I'm running Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and love them to bits. But, (and there's always a but isn't there), I'm copping spam email.

I've been training the junk mail filter which is doing its thing nicely, but I seem to be still getting the cruddy stuff. I've been logging into my ISP webmail and blocking the emails there as well. I have stemmed the tide but not stopped the flow if you know what I mean.

Is there anything else that I can/should be doing to stop them all together?

I have hardly been a target at all for some several years, and I suspect my darling who has been trawling thru ebay has made this machine susceptable.

Handing over ...

[Capt Claret]

G'day Voice,

No 1 son, complete with computing degree, informs me that one reason I'm getting so much spam is that my email address is too easy to guess

He suggest that instead of just using [email protected] I should add my middle initial, as the spamming software hasn't got that far yet.

I'm gunna try it coz the spam is driving me up the wall, particularly the arzholes at some US florist I used once. Nary a day passes without several emails from these illegitemate children, extolling me to send flowers for some reason or another. :mad:

[shack]

Help yourself to Mailwasher Free then you can delete all the rubbish before it gets to Thunderbird. If you are not sure about an email you can look inside it before you download it.

[seacue]

I use Mailwasher and think highly of it.

Nevertheless one must decide whether the mail it declares to be suspect really is. Otherwise one loses legit messages - which I have done. Once you tell Mailwasher to delete them (on your ISP) they are gone and can't be recovered.

Half the spam I receive is not in roman characters. It's easy to decide to throw those messages away without downloading.

Mailwasher allows safe examination of the first part of message's text in plain ASCII without downloading. One can also examine the header and discover that those messages from eBay really aren't.

I think of Mailwasher as my first line of defence against viruses and worms. I can delete suspect messages on my ISP without them ever reaching my machine. Never the unintended opening of an infected message that somehow slipped by my antivirus software.

Mailwasher is especially valuable if one uses dialup access since one can decide whether or not to download huge messages or those with attachments. This can save a lot of connection time.

[Ausatco]

I'm a fan of Mailwasher too. I use the Pro version with a subscription to their FirstAlert database of spam. When I delete something as spam off my ISP's server, it is also registered in FirstAlert. After a bit of processing and verification, if that email is subsequently detected by FirstAlert's baysian filter you and other subscribers to FirstAlert won't ever see it again. Unless you or they choose to, of course - visibility of that rubbish is a settable option for the user.

It give me great pleasure consigning unsolicited crap to some bit bucket in the sky, unseen.

Recommended

AA

[egbt]

Capt Claret

I’m afraid No 1 son is still in his ivory tower. Spamers don’t need to guess e-mail addresses, it’s easier, quicker, cheaper and more accurate to harvest them or buy them from someone else who has done the harvesting.

Harvesting is done a number of ways including, in no particular order, grabbing your e-mail address from you PC whilst you are visiting a web site, scanning web pages, directories, mailing lists etc, stealing them from other sites, using virues/worms/trogens etc to get access to corporate or individuals contact/mailing lists. Even buying them from supposedly reputable companies.

The problem is once a spamer has confirmation that an address is real (eg if you try and “de-register” or send an angry e-mail) they have got you and can sell your address on, at a premium, to other spamers.

At work we block between 95% and 99% of all inbound mail as spam (with virtually 100% accuracy in terms of false rejections), that’s well over 15,000 spam mails every DAY through our European e-mail gateway and about the same through gateways in the US and Asia. To achieve this we spend a ton of money and still some get through (particularly with a new type over the last week or so).

As an individual, the only (partial) solution is to use some decent ant-spam software in conjunction with or part of a good personal firewall and anti-virus product and if available from your ISP switch on their anti-spam protection.

[The Voice]

Clarrie, No 1 son - is the same son known to me? If not I do hope that he is doing well these days (No 2 son).

Thanks for the advice from all. I use AVG, Adaware, Zonelabs and spyware Doctor - again all from this site. I have previously tango'd with Mailwasher but I did find it back then (a couple of years ago when I switched from mac to PC :hmm:) a bit of a chore.

If there isn't any other thing I could do for myself, then I think EGBT's tip of turning on the ISP spam bomb may be the best way to go ...

thanks all ...