The Big Business of Fighting Spam

[Pieter_Arntz]

The sheer volume of electronic junk mail has overwhelmed users' inboxes and IT managers in the past few years, consuming valuable bandwidth and storage space while embarrassing and annoying its recipients.

Full story: http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20702.html

[root]

Personally I think spammers should be prosecuted and sent to prison for an extremely long period of time for crimes against humanity. >:(

[Tinribs]

I think spam is only going to get worse and worse, I rely on filters on my email client (The Bat!) and they work well, I dont have filtered emails 'deleted from server' and not downloaded (just in case a legit one slips by) but my spam folders regularly get upwards of 30 a day >:(

The annoying thing is that its not going to stop,I recieve plenty that are recieved with many names similar to mine that have obviously been harvested.

My only advice is thus;

Never give out your main email address to anyone who isnt known to you and trusted.

If you need to supply an email address for a forum or for trial software etc then use an email account especially set up for this process. This is especially true if you use newsgroups where harvesters are very common (you can even set up a 'spam trap' in your 'reply address' such as me@myispDIESPAMMERS.com)

Learn your email clients filters well, and tweak them if anything slips by.

Use software designed to combat spam (plenty are available and many work well)

Resist the urge to 'unsubscribe' via a link in the spam email,often this just confirms your existance and increases the spam (although I have unsubscribed successfully from many, be selective)

And finally, remember its nothing personal, everyone gets spam and always will, the best you can do is limit the ammount you have to see.

Any other tips I hope will follow from others.

Kev


:)

[Pilli]

Hello Pieter, I use mailwaser www.maiwasher.com to filter my email before it arrives and delete spam on the server, I very rarely use the bounce command as most spam headers are spoofed - >:(

I get upwards of 30 spam emails a day & these are mostly from my website addresses. I believe there is a way of stopping bots from getting these email addresses but cannot find a link or "how to" at present :(

[Pieter_Arntz]

Hi Pilli,

Some useful tips for that can be found in this thread: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=3828;start=0

Regards,

Pieter

[Pilli]

Cheers Pieter, I have taken a look at several of those links & picked one that I think is OK :)

I have added the MyEmail.png file to my web page - A little inconvienient to those that need to email from the site but better than Spam!!! :o

I generally receive ten times more spam from pilliwinks.net than "real" email - Hopefully I shall see an improvement soon.

[Pieter_Arntz]

The human gene pool should be incapable of producing enough idiots to financially support the vast number of spammers whose scat litters so many inboxes. ;D

How do they make money?
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57613,00.html

Regards,

Pieter