AntiSpam Measures Failing

Hi!

I am getting more spam than ever and it's getting a chore. I am tempted to give up and get rid of my non-Gmail accounts (the gmail filter seams pretty effective).

I used to find that Thunderbird did a pretty good job of filtering out the spam then I'd report them using the Knujon plugin to TB (after growing tired of the Spamcop reporting process). However I've recently been blighted with spam that Thunderbird ignores.

It seams to use two main techniques:

1. the spam "message" is contained in a GIF so that filters will not work against it.

2. some of the messages contain strange text to throw the Spam Filter heuristics off. I guess the filters work on a statistical analysis of words.

Sample text:

etc....

Is it possible that Thunderbirds Spam Filter is nerfed or are the techniques I am observing above enough to render it useless?

I suspect there is a single spam network behind these emails as they have a consistent style and the Subject lines tend to follow a pattern (which varies across time but is often similar on a particular day).

Any thoughts. Am I going off on a tangent or is this a real phenomenon. Is there a better approach. I've tried Mailwasher Pro and would even switch to it if it was an email client, I find it does nearly but not quite everything I need for an email program and find switching to the mail client a cumbersome and needless part of using Mailwasher Pro.

I'm going to look at Sam Spade now as another thread suggests it.

Thanks,
Phasechange

 

And of course there is a reporting mechanism in the UK:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/Home/complaints/privacy_and_electronic_communications.aspx

Although it hardly lends itself to automation with a choice of snail mail or Word Document by email submission.

The word document includes this gem:

Oh yeah I'm going to start email correspondence with Spammers. Perhaps I should just post my email address and identity details on some P0rn forums too.

Phasechange

 

Try this: forward your e-mail/domain adress to a gmail account, then forward this account to your e-mail client, e g thunderbird. That´s how I´ve done to cope with the spam problem and it works pretty well. No spam for several months and the gmail filter is working quite effectivly. If some spam would pass the gmail filter (not happened yet), thunderbird would handle it.

Regards, C.

 

Thanks I'll try it. I'll have to check to see if my ISP supports forwarding.

I've also improved my Spam handling by setting up this rule in Thunderbird to handle image spam.

http://ossian.myby.co.uk/rule.png

I then report it to Knujon using the plugin (although I have to send most of my spam to the Stockjunk address).

I notice that Thunderbird supports headers set by SpamAssassin/SpamPal. As I do not run my own mail server (although maybe I should look into this) are there mail service providers that set these tags? e.g. Fastmail

I would like to set up DNS Blacklisting is this only possible if I run Mailwasher or my own mail server?

Thanks,
Phasechange