Re: Junk Mail -- Ways to Reduce

In article <0001HW.C5A90A510008B733B01AD9AF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@xxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:1http://kb.earthlink.net/case.asp?article=4631#5:41 -0600, Dave Balderstone wrote (in article
<300120091615415585%dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

[commenting on dealing with junk mail]

The ONLY way to deal with spam mail is to delete it, whether at the server
or at the mail client.

Do you actually think the spammers are sending that stuff from their own
computers?

I regularly get bounce messages because somewhere, some Windows user has
my address on their machine, and that computer has been taken over and is
running as a zombie.

So when you bounce a message, it's going to go to somebody who has NO
CONNECTION THE THE SPAM WHATSOEVER.

I just spoke with a good friend who is quite versed in these kind of things
and he stated that Dave is right on, that at this time bouncing is of no use
and that all one can really do is delete the spam.

Yep.

Have you checked with your email service provider to see if they offer
spam blocking on the server side?

My ISP is Earthlink, so for my home email, I use their SpamBlocker
service. It's a challenge/response service that sends a "challenge"
email to people who email you asking that they visit a web page to
request access. When they do this, you get an email asking if they are
to be allowed. It then holds all suspect email automatically until you
have allowed the sender by adding them to an address book on the server.
It can be configured to send you daily/weekly spam reports listing the
suspect email that is currently on hold, and can automatically delete
suspect email after it reaches a given age too. It works very well. Your
ISP may offer something similar. More info:

<http://kb.earthlink.net/case.asp?article=4631>

For most other email, I use the most excellent POPfile email
classification filter:

<http://getpopfile.org/>

It's not super easy to install and set up, but once it's running, it's
stable, reliable, and very accurate once it's trained for a month or so.
What's really cool is you can run it on any computer and allow any email
client on any other computer to connect to it and use it for filtering.
So it can serve as the SPAM filter for your whole family, for instance.
I highly recommend it if you can bear the install/configure part of it.

For my Usenet email address, I use the SPAM filtering built into
<http://pobox.com>, which deletes *tons* of SPAM that hits the account.
It can be configured to hold or bounce messages based on all kinds of
different criteria. The few messages that do get through are usually
legitimate, but they get filtered once more by POPfile on my end. The
end result is I get no SPAM on this account, but do need to check
discards every now and then to ensure a false positive isn't there
(which does happen occasionally).

For all web forms, I use my Hotmail address. It gets lots of news
letters and that type of junk mail. I just delete that crap manually
occasionally to clear out my Inbox.

--
Send responses to the relevant news group rather than email to me.
E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my very hungry SPAM
filter. Due to Google's refusal to prevent spammers from posting
messages through their servers, I often ignore posts from Google
Groups. Use a real news client if you want me to see your posts.

JR
.

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