[Radix]

Spammers are relentless in their efforts to beat filtering.

An Industry is born.

[Nephi]

And Congress has yet to pass a bill to outlaw these vile and annoying messages.

I'd prefer those b*a*s*t*a*r*d*s* stay away from the internet.

[steplock]

 Spam Arrest 
Description: Spam Arrest, your starting point for stopping spam. Unlike other anti-spam solutions, Spam Arrest quickly and easily blocks spam before it ever gets to your inbox — no matter how the spam is disguised or where it comes from.

Common Sense Security Guide (pdf) 
Description: The Electronic Industries Alliance has produced the “Common Sense Guide for Home and Individual Users”
This 26-page guide to safe-computing strategies has the support of government agencies and industry leaders.

[Flyer]

I have a project for a geek. . .

How about am application that checks every incoming mail to see if it will accept replies. If not, it is deleted before downloading.

Who does business with a company that won't accpt replies to their email?? ARGH!

[steve-b]

Obviously, we can't shoot spammers.

Why the hell not?

[TomServo]

Been using Spamnet for months. It ain't gonna be free much longer.

[snooker]

One of the most effective ways to block spam is to 'bounce it'. This throws the spam back at the sender as many times as they try and spam you. It affixes a header which tells the mailer there is no one at the address.

It takes manually setting it the first time, but with KMail all you have to do is reply as 'bounce'. Soon no more spammers.

It's free with Linux.

I have a spam free world.

snooker

[spodefly]

MailWasher Pro v3.0 ... it has bounce capabilities, blacklist, etc. and works with the email while it is still on the server, before anything has to be downloaded to your machine ...

[dark_lord]

Obviously, we can't shoot spammers.

Do you really want to fight them? Do you? Here is a way. To do it you have to understand how spammers make money. To do so, they have to sell their services. To sell their services they have to (a) use a real not bogus email address, and (b) have a real phone number where you can call them. Otherwise, how are they going to process your credit card to get paid? But it is still not easy to track them down. They use phony registrar information for their web sites. The addresses they use are mail drops (like MailBoxes etc.)

But they have to be reachable by their customers. So with persistance you can eventually reach a phone number where someone will answer and admit to be working for a "bulk emailer." At that point, put your fax machine in autoredial on that phone number. Every time they pick up -- annoying squeal.

As far as I know, this is not illegal.

[Billthedrill]

Personally I'd prefer to hunt them down one by one like dogs, anywhere in the world they're hiding from a scorpion-infested hole in the Kalahari to the frozen, inhospitable caves of Tibet, put them on public display at COMDEX where they'd be forced to listen to vendor speeches for a week, and throw their writhing carcasses into a large pool filled with piranha.

It may not be as practical as a spam filter but it's lots more fun.

[k2blader]

Has anyone tried the freeware SpamPal?

Thumbs up or thumbs down?

[Dr. Scarpetta]

We changed our e-mail address and stopped using Outlook Express after getting a virus. We were being spammed with disgusting porn solicitations. After we got rid of the virus, we starting using Yahoo, and I don't get spam anymore.

(I don't encourage anyone to send me jokes because I don't want my e-mail address circulating all over the place.)

[ikka]

Completely FREE, will always be so: SpamAssassin, click here

[justlurking]

I use Razor (http://razor.sourceforge.net), which runs on a Unix server and queries the same servers used for SpamNet/Cloudmark. I have a number of compromised email addresses that only get spam, so I use them as spam traps and report them right away to the Razor servers. Unfortunately, I'm apparently at the top of some of the mailing lists and am the first person to receive some spam -- it ends up in my Inbox. If I don't report it right away, I find that someone has already done so.

I tried the Mailblock service (http://www.mailblocks.com), but found that:

1. It held messages I sent to the address for confirmation, but never sent the query message to the originating address. After a couple of weeks, it declared them as spam and deleted them.
2. The $10 fee (for 3 years, I think) was never posted to my credit card.
3. Repeated queries to tech support got no response.

I concluded that Mailblocks is not a viable service. Your mileage may vary. I've used SpamCop (http://www.spamcop.net/) in the past as a user, but now I simply check the sending mail server against SpamCop's DNS blacklist, and terminate the connection if it's a known spam sender. It means that some of my spamtraps are rendered useless, but it has really cut down on the missed spam.

[LibKill]

Go here: Mailwasher. (Will open in new window.)

It's free.

You will need to know your SMTP Server Address BEFORE you attempt install. If you don't know what that means get a techie friend to help you or call your Internet Service Provider. There is a cure for spam. It's fun to sling spam back at the spammer.

[WIladyconservative]

Mozilla's last two builds both have a junk filter - but so far no help text on said junk filter. I'm sure it'll be coming soon . . . .

[sharktrager]

I like Mailwasher. The single account version is free, and it sends bounce messages to the addresses you blcklist.

[Jhoffa_]

I just block entire domains with Outlook Express.

I have so damn many in there now I, I am honestly amazed anyone can email me anything at this point.

[supercat]

Spammers are relentless in their efforts to beat filtering.

There is something I don't understand.

Most spammers are engage in their vile tactics for the purpose of making money. They may figure that their spams are worthwhile if they generate a 0.01% positive response rate.

It seems to me that spamming people who have made an effort not to be spammed not only takes more work than spamming those who haven't, but more significantly the positive response rate among those people is apt to be less than 0.00001%.

Why do the spammers bother?

My theory: there are companies that sell "advertising services"; they upsell the service they provide, and thus land contracts to "promote" some foolish but otherwise legitimate business. The spammers don't care about positive responses, since they've tricked their clients into paying for "exposures". A similar phenomenon is at work, btw, with many of the really annoying multi-pop-up porno ads that appear when a domain name is misspelled.

If this is what's really going on, then this means the key may be not just to try to protect people from spam, but also to try to protect businesses from phony "promotional services" companies. If spamsters can no longer use spam to defraud legitimate businesses of advertising revenues, spam will in many cases largely dry up.

[supercat]

Back in the days when I used Pegasus, I set it to color-highlight all messages with my email address in the To: header. Although there were some legitimate non-spam messages which did not list me as recipient [e.g. messages to mailing lists to which I was legitimately subscribed] it was pretty easy to add rules for those too.

About 95% of the non-colored stuff was spam, as compared with about 10% of the colored stuff.

[Revolting cat!]

A year and a half ago I received no spam. Today: a dozen messages a day at work and another dozen at one of my Yahoo addresses which I've been using for several years to order goods from online stores (And Yahoo's filters have not been able to, uhm, filter out half of them.) The other Yahoo addresses receive no spam. For a while, after a visit to Europe last year, I was getting spam in German at my work address. I still haven't figured out where they got the address- did I put it down at a hotel I was staying, or was it my friend's friend who got my business card and who was a starving minor enterpreneur?

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to let you know that most recently I received at work a couple of spams offering, well, spam services. I saved them and will post these tomorrow morning for your viewing pleasure (and whatever else you can cook up!) Imagine the nerve!