The answer to Spam ? Maybe YES

[MasterGreen]

Well I may just have found the answer to spam emails. Recently it has been getting much worse and the spams were coming in thick and fast. I was filtering / deleting and even (don't tell me) in desperation, using the "opt out" features on some of the more respectable looking ones. Nothing worked. I had the idea that maybe I could find a way of "Bouncing" the spam back (when I could properly find the source that is) with a forged header showing a "bounced / shutdown" account. As far as this went it seemed a good idea. But it gets very complicated making that "bounce header" look good enough to fool even me.....

Anyway, while researching the project, I came across a program that does it all, better than I even dreamed of. Deletes and bounces and even looks up "suspect" emails on the DNS Blacklist servers in real time for you. Easy to use for sure - just a click and off it goes. Lots of options to declare "friendly" emails that it marks as otherwise dodgy. In all a little gem. Nothing big or fancy - just very clever. And best of all it is freeware with a contribution option.

Give it a look. It has been a real saviour in this household for sure. It is a certainly worth a contribution from this 'puter user. What amazes me is that this idea has not already been included in Eudora etc.... But then maybe it will be soon....

Here is the URL :

MailWasher - Spam Bouncer and remover

[BOAC]

Thanks MG - on a first look it seems brilliant. The writer definitely deserves a dollar or two!

[Mac the Knife]

Nice, but won't all that spam bouncing back clog up Net bandwidth still more? I s'pose if everyone starts using it the b****rs will give up. Wish my ISP could block everyone in my Outlook Junk Senders list!

Anyway, thanks for the tip - I'll give it a whirl.

[rob_frost]

hotmail

On my hotmail account, I block every junk message sender. Dunno whether it reaches say 50, then just deletes old ones, but its doesn't work.

[MasterGreen]

Blocking and deleting just does not seem to work as delivery is assumed to have occurred. Most serious spammers are now using a number of highly automated programs and I can only assume that these things take notice of "dead / bounced" accounts. Certainly, after only a week of running MailWasher, my spam count (Yes dear, I said spam !!) has dropped dramatically.

In a perverse way I am dissappointed - I was getting something of a small "kick" out of being proactive on the issue rather than just taking all this spam in and deleting same.

If anyone is interested in learning more about spam and the massive attempts that are going on behind the scenes to combat it - here are a couple of links. However the real answer is some positive, global, legal intervention. Not this washy "Opt-Out" nonsense that is currently in use.

That sending a "Bounced" email back is a waste of bandwidth is a marginal argument. If one "bounce" email back stops many more to your address, then it is a saving.

Sputum Anti Spam

Spam News

[Mad Monk]

A useful piece of kit; but does anyone know of a similar product that runs with Eudora under Mac OS 9 or at a push OS X ?

[Sensible]

Mailwasher is certainly a first class product, it allows a sneak preview of suspect e-mails whilst they are still sitting in the server to check if they may be viruses and makes it a simple task to delete them since most of the spam is marked for bounce and deletion automatically. I have also found that the junk seems to be on the decrease all except the porn, especially "farmyard sex" and since I have never opened any of these mails or visited porn sites, I am not sure why I should be receiving unsolicited and unwanted mailings at the rate of two or three a day!

I sent my $25 to the author of mailwasher in the hope that he may be encouraged to develop mailwasher and others to end the curse of spam and pop-ups!

[FJJP]

I finally got rid of the problem. In OE I went to TOOLS-ACCOUNTS and deleted the Hotmail account. Now the spammers, porners et al can fill up the Hotmail server until their hearts content - at least I'm not getting any of their cr*p.

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

Anti-spam techniques...

Paul Graham is doing some interesting work on statistical spam filtering...

[BRL]

Typical isn't it. About 4 weeks ago, i started getting spam on my outlook express in my bt accounts. They were using a list as sometimes I could see in the 'to' bit other similar names to mine. Anyway, I download the program above and wait. And wait, and wait........!! No bloody spam yet to 'bounce' back....

[Boss Raptor]

Unfortunately I dont think all these Spam Filters are infalable...

Many spammers use other innocent parties SMTP/IP to send their crap into the e-mail network...therefore I would think cannot be cross referenced against the DNS black list...

Still if people dont secure there SMTP and Hosting Services continue to host the websites of the spammers! I have been reporting all spam to the site hoster and their communication supplier, in many cases the spam stops however their are some hosting services who just dont care! Most appear to be in the US where the SPAM laws appear inadequate as the offenders cry 'freedom of speech'!!


The messages I love are the 'this is not SPAM because we have provided an unsubscribe link in accordance with Federal Law blah blah' - Bullsh*t it is unsolicited SPAM!!!


Suggest the answer is with the legislators especially in the US...I understand that many EU countries have already made SPAM illegal including Germany and Holland...this enables controlling action to be taken against both the senders and the hosters...so they then just move across the Atlantic...

[Danny]

Ref spam control for the Mac, try POPmonitor from http://www.vechtwijk.nl/dev/index.html and I use PopUp Zapper from http://batista.org/zap/ to control pop up windows. both work well and I have used them both under Mac OS 9 and X.

[BRL]

Silly isn't it. Some of the spam is being sent to my 2 and a bit year old daughters e-mail addy, yet the e-mail says you have to be 18 to apply even though the address starts with baby(daughters name)...... Also, all of the offers are only open to usa residents too. If they want to arrange me moving out there and paying for a house/job ect then i would be more than happy to spend the rest of my life recieving spam from them..

Still waiting by the way...... (Desperate to 'bounce' them all back......)

[curmudgeon]

Big Red,

If you're really desperate I'll forward mine to you!!!!

[BRL]

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssss 4 mails 'bounced' back today...!!!! At last..

[CBLong]

I've got lots of different email addresses, all in the same domain - partly because of having things like 'support@...', 'questions@...' etc on my website, and partly because I always give a unique email address when registering for things (eg 'telegraph@...' when registering for the Telegraph's website). Because of this, the best spam indicator for me is when the same email has been sent to several of my addresses. Does anyone know of a spam filter that works on this basis??

It would seem to be trivial for an ISP to filter out spam based on either (a) looking for emails being sent to thousands of their users at once, or (b) looking for emails being sent to dummy 'honeytrap' addresses, or (c) both. There would be a huge market for guaranteed spam-free hosting - why don't they do it???

There would be a risk that bulk email from 'legitimate' sources like Amazon might get killed too, but the honeytrap addresses shouldn't ever receive those ones...

cbl.

[OllyBeak]

Mr Mad Monk (or Rev or Father or whatever),

The mail application that comes with OS X has a very good junk mail filter. I gave up on Entourage last week - claims to have filters, but nowt seemed to work.

The Apple one worked almost perfectly after only one day of 'training'.

This evening I got four real messages and 72 piles of poo. All correctly identified.

I'll have a look at POP monitor and see if it's even better.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam.

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

Anti-spamming...

Because of this, the best spam indicator for me is when the same email has been sent to several of my addresses. Does anyone know of a spam filter that works on this basis??

That depends on how you get your email. If you run (or have control over) your mailserver, then it's easy to do there -- contact me offline if you want more info. I'm not as up to speed on the PC client end of things (as I do my spam filtering on my server ).

It would seem to be trivial for an ISP to filter out spam based on either (a) looking for emails being sent to thousands of their users at once, or (b) looking for emails being sent to dummy 'honeytrap' addresses, or (c) both. There would be a huge market for guaranteed spam-free hosting - why don't they do it???

There would be a risk that bulk email from 'legitimate' sources like Amazon might get killed too, but the honeytrap addresses shouldn't ever receive those ones...

Beacuse you (a) cannot guarantee that any given spam will include the "honeytrap" address and (b) you cannot safely assume that mail to "thousands of their users at once" is spam -- many users may well have singned up to a popular newsletter which they may well all recieve at once.

I am firmly of the view that it should not be the recipient (or their ISP) who have to bear the cost of anti-spam measures [well, except as described below.] It should be the sender's ISP who should be penalised for tolerating spammers as their users.

There is a way of doing this, but it's not a "quick fix" (which is what most people want ) -- it's very much short term pain for long(er) term gain.

There are a number of "Realtime Blocking Lists" (with different "membership" criteria) which allow ISPs or people running their own servers to refuse to accept incoming mail from servers or whole networks (read ISPs) based on those criteria. This is the most efficient way of blocking mail from the recipient's (or their ISP's) point of view -- no disk space required to store the spam while it's scanned, no additional CPU resources needed to scan it to establish if it's spam, etc.

Of course, the downside is that this will block legitimate email as well (in the short term), but it pushes the cost of dealing with the spam back onto the spammer's ISP -- it's now they who have their disk clogged up with all the mail that everybody else is refusing to accept -- until they choose to be less spam friendly and thus get themselves off the Bloking Lists.

Rant over