Posted on 10/21/2003 6:25:16 AM PDT by logic101.net
I am sick of spam. I have tried blocking senders, they get new acounts daily. I have tried the "unsubscribe" links, some might work, but enough don't (or are ignored) that my e-mail address is sold again and again. I have tried creating mail rules, but they keep changing the spellings and punctuation, or use on and off caps to defeat this, or they advertise a different drug.
I have gotten some spam from spam blocking sites, and am wondering if this is cost effective. The latest one I got was for "Spam Remedy 2.3" Has anyone used any of these programs and do they work? How much do they cost? Are they worth my time and trouble?
Most of the spam I get is porn, one would think that these people could be charged with "contributing to the delinquency of minors" since they don't care who they send their stuff to. Next is for perscription drugs, also illegal to just dole out to anyone. Where is the FBI in this?
Also, I just don't get where these people make money other than selling mailing lists. Do enough people go for their stuff to make up for the time and trouble? I can't see where a spamer would ever get more than 1 hit out of 5000 e-mails. And don't they ever get the hint that the other 4,999 are a waste of their time?
Personally, I'd like to see the FBI find a way to find spamer's computers, and send a single use virus to burn the hard drives out. Since much of this stuff is overseas it seems like the only option. I never had too much trouble with telemarketers; only one can call at a time. Not only that, they can't be sending children porn over the phone (ok well not so easily anyway). These spamer's are almost as disgusting and evil as Hitlery and it's "husband"!
Any advice on limiting this trash would be appreciated.
Mark A Sity
The law needs to recognize the deliberate circumvention of anti-spam filters as a form of computer cracking, and apply the existing laws against this form of trespass.
As I recall, Kevin Mitnick got five years for this offense, even though Mitnick did far less actual damage than a typical spammer.
Another Hint #2: turn off or disable features in your email prefs that "allow network access" in case you have enabled "display complex HTML" option your email.
If you don't - the sender(s) still can get notified even if you are only scrolling through your messages.
Who's to say what it would have been had you NOT used MailWasher? I think there is just so much more of it coming, surely, the telemarketers must have seen the DoNotCall list coming, and have moved into spam.
2. Many 'bounce' notifications come back because there is no legitimate email account being addressed.
You get your bounces back? I don't seem to get too many. Yet. Anyway, what else can you do but attempt to bounce them, as if your email address were not valid?
3. Too often, I have failed to recognize a legitimate email, inadvertently blacklisting the sender and missing out on further emails.
I scan the Subject: line, I don't miss any legit emails that way. About all the false positives I get are from eBay sellers contacting me about winning an auction. Those are easy to pick up if you're looking at the subject line.
4. Mailwasher ties up your system while it does its thing. Depending on how many bounces are being generated, this can take quite some time
So does downloading spam into your email client. I usually begin an Internet session by opening MailWasher, then browsing a site while it works. The only nasty interruption I get is when Outlook Express loads up, that's because I've chosen to let MW automatically start OE after its done.
5. I still use Mailwasher, but more from inertia than benefit.
If someone came along with something markedly better, I might be persuaded to switch, but I haven't seen any such thing. All solutions are asked to deal with a steadily rising tide of spam, it's difficult to evaluate one product vs. another over time. I've been quite happy with MW, have used it for over a year, and it does what it says it will do, without messing up my computer in some other way, pretty good for a product that only wants a donation to pay for it.
The real solution to spam will come when ISPs all figure out a way to charge for email, since they bear the cost of bandwidth for all of this trash.
Here is way that blocks upwards of 95% of spam in Outlook by setting up the rules below.
Rule 1 checks if a sender's address is in your address book. (Make sure that relatives, friends, and others who send email that you want to receive are in your address book.) If sender's email address is in your address book, rule 1 stops processing further rules.
Rule 2 checks for the real nasty words that are common in most porno spam or words or phrases that will never be in an email that you want to receive. (Some spam may evade this rule by the spelling tricks, but rule 4 will catch most.) It permanently deletes the email and stops processing more rules.
Rule 3 checks for sender's whose email address may change, but whose email you want to receive (i.e., sent from Amazon, your state Republican Party). Rule 3 just stops processing more rules.
Rule 4 checks message headers for "html or text/html or multipart/alternative or multipart/mixed." If the email does have such headers, it is most likely spam and you can set the rule to move it to your deleted files folder and stop processing further rules. This is the rule that should get 95 percent of the spam that use spelling tricks, etc. to get through rule 2.
Most spam will have at least one of the message headers and will be moved to your deleted file folders.
A stronger version of rule 4 can permanently delete all email with the listed headers, but might inadvertantly permanently delete email that you want to receive. By moving it to the deleted folder, you can quickly scan the sender's name of email in the deleted folder and "rescue" any email that you wanted to receive.
Importantly, you must have the rules work in order from 1 to 4 by moving rules up or down so that rules 1 to 4 are in order from top to bottom.
Rules 2 and 3 especially may require updating every now and again when a significant amount of spam is getting through.
It takes some effort, but above should help at least substantially reduce the problem.
That stuff is most likely RUSSIAN text . . I get it all the time too . . get a SPAMCOP account, and foward the entire message as an attachment to SPAMCOP.
I have a website, http://antispam.aussiemate.com where you can get some email address where to report spam, and to report phishing (spoofing) emails.
GO GET EM CHAMP!
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