VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[brianforrester]

So... we all know how much fun spam is and as much as I like to know that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who want to help me "satisfy my girl" or "make love like a porn star" not to mention the opportunity to "earn money in my sleep", the volume of spam that I recieve has reached an all time high!

As of yesterday, I am receiving between 80 and 120 junk spam mails per day. Yes, I'm not the most careful person when it comes to signing up on sites etc... but that aside I pose the following question.

What anti-spam program or service are you using and what have been the results?

In my perfect world, I'd be able to cut the spam out before it makes its way to either my pc mail client or my palm treo running versa mail.

While the intent of this thread is somewhat self-serving I'd really like to stimulate a dialogue and see if we can't call learn from eachother's experiences (duh! that's what we do!)

Looking forward to reading.

Cheers,

Brian
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Brian Forrester Voice Overs
www.brianforrester.com
brian@brianforrester.com
778.668.5715

[bobsouer]

[Tom Greenlee]

I use and am happy with, MailWasher Pro. It runs in your system tray (Windows), and filters all incoming mail based on rules you've created. The icon flashes when you receive email and you can view all the emails while they are still on your server. It gives you the opportunity to delete, bounce, blacklist any incoming email. The ones that match rules you set up are automatically marked for deletion and bounce etc, depending on if you told it to do that. It also gives you the ability to not see the emails that have been determined to be spam. That can be turned on and off. It has a learn function as well. The longer you use it the less and less spam you will see in your inbox. And it's all done from the mail server before it ever makes it to your computer email program. Once you have verified all is well with how it dealt with your email, you click on the process email button and it deletes, bounces etc the marked emails and then automatically opens your computer email program and the only email you receive are the good ones. It sounds long and involved but it takes a matter of seconds for all this to transpire. Oh...and it also includes a report function which sends your spam email to several spam databases and every user of this program that reports their spam, the same thing. It then uses that known spam from the databases to filter your incoming mail, so you benefit from everyone else that has reported spam. I would recommend this program.
_________________
TG2

"Communication without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communication is irrelevant."

Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
Former Commandant of the Marine Corps

[Don G.]

All of my hosts have SpamAssassin available. I set it up with a threshhold of 5 and if spam still makes it through, I drop it down to 4. As far as I know, no "real" mail hasn't made it through. The guy who did my site set it up so that anyone emailing me through the link on the site gets an automatic subject line of "Message from website", and they do come through fine.

I've also heard excellent things about SpamSieve, but as long as the free SpamAssassin works for me, I see no reason to pay.

[LaurenLee]

I second the Mailwasher endorsement -- with all the details just cited. Been using it for years now and recommend it highly.
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Blue skies -- Lauren Lee
www.voiceover.ca

[donrandall]

My website host provides something called "Box Trapper".

I have it set to respond with one of those messages you sometimes see that challenge the mailer to look at the distorted letter and number combination that appears and then print them into a field - once they do that successfully, they are allowed to proceed with their e-mail to me.

In theory, it should stop all automated spam. In practice, I am still getting some. Not nearly as much as before, but I am getting some.

[LaurenLee]

Don G. wrote: "As far as I know, no "real" mail hasn't made it through."

That's the ticket, isn't it? I've been back and forth with AOL for months now, as one of my clients never receives email from my email client -- can only receive it when I log into webmail and send from there. It's a hassle to do it that way but it works. I'm just frustrated at the circularity of the buck-passing -- no problem on AOL's end, no problem on the client's end, no problem on my ISP's end, or so they all say.

As DB would put it -- myeh.
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Blue skies -- Lauren Lee
www.voiceover.ca

[mcm]

Can anyone tell me how spamsters actually harvest email addresses? Do they scrape up anything with an @ in it, or does there have to be a link?

I sent an email address to an ad agency this morning. The address on their website was to sue@ but the link was to ellen@ I used the linked address and got a failure notice ("no such user"), so I started over with the address that was actually on the page and it went through. I thought if the link is the key, then this was a clever way for the agency to reduce spam.

[bobsouer]