A Sudden Decrease in Spam?

This is very odd.

Just a bit of history.
I have SBC Yahoo DSL, and I know they have (or are going to) migrated my older Ameritech mail accounts to their newer servers. But, I thought this happened many months ago.

Regardless, I have been testing Outlook 2007 (got it for a great price) set only to allow those in my address book through. I have a copy of Spamihilator which I haven't implemented yet.


I have getting 100-300 spams a day (properly placed into the junk mail folder, of course)...and perhaps 5 legit e-mails arriving in my mailbox.

Nothing wrong with that, but it was still a PITA to sift through all those spams. I simply view them, and empty the folder before closing the program.

But two days ago, I am suddenly getting only a few spam a day. And, the spam that I got today was from legitimate vendors that I have done business with in the past, but have no need to articulate with, so I just leave it in the junkmail folder, and delete it upon exit.

Anyone else have this happen? Any idea why?

Bob

 

Hi
This happened to me awhile back when my ISP provider started deleting any mail they considered as spam. At the server website in options I found the box to delete spam immediateley was selected. I could change this option if I wanted to.

 

I wondered if that might have something to do with it....I will check the settings soon.

I mean, I'm not complaining or anything! I love the decrease in spam, but have a mild concern that proper e-mails will be deleted.

Bob

 

My ISP deletes all spam, and does not give the subscriber access to the spam filter which is disastrous for the subscriber, if the email is a news letter type email and not addressed directly to the person or can other wise classified as spam you would not get the email, I ordered a something from FRYS.COM . They use DHL delivery service, I configured the service to send me emails when ever they completed a step in my stuffs delivery. Now If I stuck to having all my email handled by my ISP I'd might never receive any of those emails, so I left the ISP email account just for ISP communication and chose a free email carrier for my other email acount with access to the spam filter. I also can add/Delete from the white/black list of Aproved/Blocked address/domains

 

My spam is also decreased significantly, but I don't know why.
Is it because I never open spam-emails and delete them immediately ?
Ignoring spammers completely is my way of fighting. Why would I pay attention to people, who stole my email-address ?
If everybody would do this, spammers wouldn't send any emails anymore and disappear automatically.
The irony or tragedy is that users themselves keep spammers alive.

Is it because my ISP blocks spam-emails already ?
I never told them to do this.

It doesn't really interest me, because my email-traffic is very small and I get the emails, I expected. All the rest is deleted when I close Thunderbird.
I have the impression that Thunderbird is better in detecting spam-emails, but I'm not sure of this.

One thing is certain : the daily 100 spam-emails are now 10 spam-emails and most of them are trashed by Thunderbird automatically.

 

I read about a week (or so) ago that one of the biggest spammers in the world got caught. Maybe that has something to do with it?

 

I used to like to open spam and examine their speeches, now I just delete the emails without opening them. I also now tend to log into forums post and log out and make my forum password harder to crack by making it longer, but one thing that most forums wont let you do is put in your public profile a modifyed email address (AT) instead of @ and (DOT) instead of . to make your email address invisible to email harvesters. I use a online email service to screen out outright spam and mail washer to read and detete some of the new letter emails and only download to my computer the emails I want to keep. BTW I also use Thunderbird.

 

Old thread, I know...but, a few days ago, SPAM suddenly increased again--to both myself and my wife's account (like 50-60 spams a day).

For a long time, my SPAM was infuriating and I was about to install a new spam filter--had downloaded it but had not set it up. Then, the SPAM suddenly went way down as mentioned above (literally 0-2 a day per account)...so I never installed the program.

I haven't made any recent changes at all, nor did I sign up for anything. We don't download anything, and I double-checked all of my settings and security stuff (including the SBC Yahoo settings) and don't see anything amiss.
Since the problem appears to be global (both of our accounts) I wonder if there is a problem on SBC YAhoo's end?

Waitaminute: ZA gave me fits over that Microsoft update conflict, so I decreased the internet zone to medium for a few days (I do have a router, NOD32 and Spybot). Could that have done it?

 

Hello:

The chance of the ZA / MS conflict having anything to do with your spam level is next to zero!

Here are some ideas to reduce spam.

1) In MS Outlook invoke the junk mail feature, update office as new filters come monthly

2) Check the High filter, check safe senders list for bad entries, review the blocked senders list and since spam comes from all over the world check off as many countries as possible on that list and use the block encoding list.

3) Change your email addresses at your isp, and when done send a message to your personal list so they know

4) When you sign up on a store web site or a forum use disposable email addresses. If spam starts up from them delete the address ! zip no spam

5) Use web mail for non personal mail and invoke their filters and mark spam when you get it. If possible put the blocked address in as a domain not just a specific address, they switch address often but changing domains is more rare.

I get 1 spam a month tops

Hope this helps you.