Your Spam Solution

[Rewdog]

I figure its time for a change as my inbox has climbed back up to 400 messages....:soapbox:

I currently use outlook express as my email client and I'm pretty happy with it. I have about 8 pop email accounts, and using message rules, each address's new message goes to its own folder. Well, I'm getting plagued by spam on about 3 of these (about 60 spams a day) and I'm wondering if any of you are using a 3rd party application to filter spam that's cheap or free? Thanks

[Karen]

I was using mailwasher, but it is pretty useless lately. I would love to find a solution to spam as well.

Could we just forward all spam to microsoft?

Karen

[interactive]

I've had a hotmail (Actually msn.com) account for quiet a long time and am hoping to get rid of it soon. I get around 10-15 spam emails a day gets rather annoying. Depending on what your email use is there's a no program where it replies back to the sender for verification. Don't know much about it, but I'm sure someone else does.

[Phrozen]

Perhaps I'm just lucky or something, but I've never really had a problem with spam. Perhaps 1 email every couple of months or so, but nothing I would ever be concerned about or feel the need to do anything about.

[hostpath.com]

I have a great spam solution, but not sure if I want to spend the time programming the server software to handle it. I could sell it to end users, for sure, but man would it be a major undertaking.

[net-trend]

Hmm why not switch mail programs? Mozilla mail has a new function where it learns what mail's are spam and trys to autodetect it or you can manually mark it as spam.

Pegasus mail has a very powerful spam filter that when done correctly, SPAM = Nil.

[suppleSupport]

Zero spam in my personal mailbox and I've had the address for almost 2 years :D I don't use a spam program, just don't give my address out to any websites .

I have a client who uses www.spamarrest.com -- I haven't tried it myself, but the first time I emailed him I got this reply:

I'm protecting myself from receiving junk mail.

Please click the address verification link below. You only need to do this once!! If you don't, I will NOT RECIEVE YOUR EMAIL!!

Just this once, click the link below so I can receive your emails. You won't have to do this again.

Might work, but as I said I haven't tried it myself so I can't say for sure.

[Debbie]

I've been using SpamPal http://www.spampal.org/ for quite a while now and it works great. You can control how aggressive it is. I have it send everything it considers spam to a special folder for that and then check the folder to see if there is anything in there I actually want before I send it all to the trash bin. You can put email addresses on a 'white list' if it bumps something from an address you want, and also add things it doesn't catch to a 'black list' too.

I also use Incredimail and that allows me to set up rules where whatever I add to that will go directly to the trash bin too. I tend to just block out the domain it came from rather than the whole from address, especially if it is from w093jgn @something.something.othercrap.some.com , varies on that how I do it...

[FindSP.com]

Don
t actually have one other than a simple confg in outlook... I'm afraid to delete the emails that I actually need together with the SPAM and that's why I'm not fond of these special anti spam software solutions..

[markblair]

As for myself I program my control panel to block spam. I have a hosting account with an Ensim control panel and I can block anything via URL or IP. What I've done is I created a catchall account that forwards all mail not specifically associated with a real e-mail address to spam@domain.com. Then I have a folder setup to receive anything sent to spam@domain.com. I can then filter from there. Right now there's probably 70 pieces of mail in one and 90 pieces of mail in another. I just haven't gotten around to adding them but once I have in the past, all messages from those stopped.

[dynamicnet]

Greetings:

We use SpamAssassin along with Vipul's Razor.

So far with some fine tuning of scores and some tests, we tag approximately 95% of the stuff that comes in as SPAM. We mistag approximately 0.5% to 1% out of every 2,000 emails.

http://www.spamassassin.org/

Take care.

P.S. If it matters, we use qmail.

[jbiz718]

Rew.

As always possibly getting a high end mail server is a solution.

http://store.guardiandigital.com/html/eng/products/software/mail_features.shtml

[FindSP.com]

By the way I just noticed.. the title: SPAM Solution???? sorry no such thing :(

[mgriffin]

We run a number of server-side solutions...

(We're Windows based, so some products are exclusively for Windows)

- Declude (www.declude.com) JunkMail (only works with I Mail) - Provides numerous tests, including all popular RBL's (we run 50 or so tests on all mail currently). Also works in a weighted configuration so more reliable tests can be weighted higher.
- IP blocking at the mail server - Most mail servers allow for blocking at the server level.
- Domain blocking at the mail server level or via Declude
- IP blocking at the firewall - I block constant spammers at the firewall to keep their mail completely out of our network. I generally block based on IP ranges listed in the SBL.
- Custom whitelist and blacklist files

With the above combination we probably stop 75% - 95%+ of the spam depending on how aggressive we are (we can configure different configurations for each domain) Our personal domains are very aggressive and I probably get one spam message every couple of weeks at most now.

- Mike

[Lamont]

The solution I found that works best for me, other than using disposable addresses on my domains, is to set up my filters to keep only emails from people I want to hear from in the inbox.

I set the filters to ignore (or move to their respective folders) approved emails then, the last rule is to move everything that has made it through the filters to a 'Pending' folder.

This keeps in my Inbox only approved emails. If a needed email gets sent to the Pending folder, I just create a rule to keep it in the Inbox.

So far, this has worked great.

I have also changed to using Mozilla's mail client which, IMO, is the best of any I've used. It handles IMAP so well that I don't use POP anymore.

[Operator]

Originally posted by elevation:

Zero spam in my personal mailbox and I've had the address for almost 2 years :D I don't use a spam program, just don't give my address out to any websites .

I have a client who uses www.spamarrest.com -- I haven't tried it myself, but the first time I emailed him I got this reply:



Might work, but as I said I haven't tried it myself so I can't say for sure.

Interesting. How would this solution work for newsletters or for those registrations that require you to verify your email address? :confused:

I use Pocomail (http://www.pocomail.com/). It works great in blocking out junk mail.

[jvn]

My primary method is using filters with Outlook and delivering mail to specified folders. I recently changed settings for my inbound mail server to bounce all mail to non-specific addresses. This cut the spam about 50%.
Also, I use a yahoo account to pre-screen info requests that I might submit to other sites. This is especially useful if I'm answering an ad.

The links in this thread give some new options to check.

[ABHS]

Originally posted by dynamicnet:
We use SpamAssassin. So far with some fine tuning of scores and some tests, we tag approximately 95% of the stuff that comes in as SPAM.
http://www.spamassassin.org/


Ditto!
Works very well with some minor adjustments.

[NetSolutionz]

For client side use if you use Outlook 2000/2002/XP (they are coding a Outlook Express plugin soon) I highly suggest http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/

This is a great product, and I have had only 1 e-mail get past it.

Hope this helps some.

[markblair]

Originally posted by NetSolutionz:

For client side use if you use Outlook 2000/2002/XP (they are coding a Outlook Express plugin soon) I highly suggest http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/

This is a great product, and I have had only 1 e-mail get past it.

Hope this helps some.

This looks like an interesting product. However, I'd rather control what I don't receive rather than not receive something because someone else considered it spam. It still looks like it can work for some ... uh' it's obviously working for many according to their site. :)

[Dave]

Originally posted by markblair:

As for myself I program my control panel to block spam. I have a hosting account with an Ensim control panel and I can block anything via URL or IP. What I've done is I created a catchall account that forwards all mail not specifically associated with a real e-mail address to spam@domain.com. Then I have a folder setup to receive anything sent to spam@domain.com. I can then filter from there. Right now there's probably 70 pieces of mail in one and 90 pieces of mail in another. I just haven't gotten around to adding them but once I have in the past, all messages from those stopped. Smart idea! :banana:

[NyteOwl]

Custom blacklists, whitelists, spamassasin and a technique known as greylisting have dropped my spam and several clients by over 90%. This is all server based of course.

Last month 6 spam made it through out of about 1000 spam received.

For a windows client based solution my neighbour has nothing but praise for his MailWasher Pro/Eudora combination.

[StarGate]

From "vanitha" at webhostforums.net where I MOD:
(I use the same method btw and have 0 spam)

Tracking sources of SPAM - a method
Recently I've been using a method to track sources of SPAM, and I've had some great luck doing so.

Since all the mail to a domain comes through to me, I decided to use SPAM-tracking email addresses nearly anytime I have to give an email address.

Here's how it works:

venturesonline@mydomain.com
vbulletinforums@mydomain.com
000domains@mydomain.com
amazon@mydomain.com

etc

When I get SPAM later on, I know who sold my name, or from where it was mined.

The results have been interesting. I've now had a couple of email conversations with people who sold or otherwise distributed my email address. They had a hard time denying that their privacy policy was not worth the bits it was printed on.

[cnm72]

I tired spam assassin and it was problematic for me... it snatched up a fair amount of emails that I did want

perhaps I will do further research on it though...

for the last 1+ year I have used cyberbuddy - http://thecyberbuddy.com/ which offers a nice spam filter that better suits my needs... the neat part about this program is that you can still view questionable mail and not be open to malicious attachments as with Outlook Express (which is what I use)

has a few other cool features also...

[tivoking]

We use MailWise. MailWise stops Spam & Viruses before they get to us and provides Emergency Email Access even if our server bursts into flames!!!
The Spam Filter free trial can be found http://www.mailwise.com

[FindSP.com]

Hey anyone tried cloudmark? just purchased the memership and it seems like a wonderful solution.

[markblair]

Hey anyone tried cloudmark? just purchased the memership and it seems like a wonderful solution. I haven't but a local news reporter recently did a story on Spam solutions and Cloudmark was the one he initially tried. He claimed that they add their signature to all outgoing e-mail? Is that true? Supposedly the option was turned off and it still did it.

[GordonH]

So you think you have spam problems?

Last year we upset one of the big gangs of spammers and now most of their emails come from @hostroute.com email addresses.
We get literally thousands of bounces per day.
This is in addition to all the normal spam resulting from having abuse and other email addresses exposed on the internet for many years.

I would guess our incoming spam is about 5 or 6 thousand a day.

Here is how I cope:

1. I run various blacklists on the server. mainly its spamhaus and ordb as these are the least likely to be problematic.
This keeps the load down as any mail from addresses on these lists gets binned immediately.
You should see the size of our exim_rejectlog!

2. We reject any message with from addresses where the domain does not have a resolvable MX record.
This deals with a lot of amateur spam but obviously people like Ralsky use .biz addresses with random names that actually do exist for the day so that doesnt help with that. Also if a customer mistypes their email address into our contact forms we don't receive the message :(

3. We have filters set which delete mail that looks like bounce messages. This is to deal with spammers using our email addresses.
BUT it means we don't get real bounce messages, which ican be a problem itself.

4. We then run what remains through Spam Assassin.
Now that spam assassin is using a blacklist which looks at the URL's in the body of the email its become very accurate.
This mail goes into a "spam" folder for review but I have not had a false positive for a couple of months.


The result of this is that our daily incoming spam is about 100 to 150 and it mainly ends up in the spam folder.
Approximately 10 to 20 spams get through into our general inbox, but given the size of the problem we have this is quite an acceptable outcome.

[ldcdc]

This is all I can say in response to Gordon's post: :yikes:

[Dave]

I have been using the CloudMark trial for the past 25 days. WOW, it is by far the best spam solution that I have come accross. The best feature is that it places what it sees as spam into a SPAM folder in Outlook, so you can actually review the folder to make sure that it did not remove something that was not spam. It has made a mistake once, which is around 1 out of 5,000.