Spam is Killing Me!

OK, I've had it. Can any of you technology-literate folks recommend a spam blocking software? Doesn't have to be free, as long as it works pretty well. By the way, I use both Outlook and Outlook Express and have about 5 email addresses (POP accounts), which I check on two PCs running on Windows XP. Please tell me what you use and what you've learned to avoid. I'd really appreciate some help.

 

Netscape 7.1 has pretty good tools for spam blocking and IMO more secure than Outlook and or IE. If you try Netscape 7.1 look in the help for Mail and Controling junk mail.

 

Try Thunderbird. It's a great little email client that has built in spam filtering tools. It learns as you teach it what is spam and what is not. I used to get hundreds of spam messages a day to my accounts and now they all get dropped in a spam directory I can easily delete. I also rarely have issues with it listing something as spam that isn't. Plus you don't have the virus issues that you do with outlook/outlook express. Great little program.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Eric

 

Another important question you should ask yourself is "How" are these spammers getting your email address.

Do you post to the newsgroups? Yahoo groups? If so, in the body I would not put your email address but to disguise it like joe at aol dot com. Also disguise or spoof your email address in the header of a post. Spammers use software that scan postings for email addresses. They want address that are not dead.

-Teak

 

You bring up a great point. I heard that many spammers find emails by searching the web for strings with @ in them. Since my organization website has my email in hyperlinks on many pages I thought that was the source of my spam problem, and I don't see a way around it. I don't subscribe to any newsgroups.

 

I use SpamAssassin ... it is free and alot of commercial products are based on it. You can get a free version of SAProxy for windows at the following URL.

ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/bloomba/SAproxyInstallerDB1.2.11b.exe

It has Bayesian learning, so it will becoming more efficient at identifying spam. Unfortunately, you can't train it easily, but it is free and probably catches 95% of the spam.

 

I use Yahoo email.

I get maybe 1-2 spam emails a week.

---------------
Got Broadband?

 

Teak,
I wish had read your post earlier. A few months ago, I posted one of my email addresses online on the HOA Forums for the first time so that residents could contact me. Right after that, I received a stream of spam contacting me, too...
:spam:

I'm now in the process of updating my own old postings so that email addresses are disguised or deleted from this message board and others. I find your advice is a great rule of thumb to follow nowadays.

Meanwhile, I like that these Forums are open to everyone to participate. I would not change that feature at all. We get some good feedback and ideas from people all over the place and it adds to the great character of the online Forum and the community overall.

(Apparently I needed an excuse to experiment with different faces, briefly, too.)

 

I have been getting more and more spam coming to my smartneighborhood.net e-mail address ... does Openband have any spam filter or any other tools that we can use to alleviate this problem ??

 

I know that this is not the best answer, but an easy thing that you can do is setup http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/ . It has some spam controls built in, and additional extensions can be added to manage other problems.

 

snoopy,
As far as I know, Smartneighborhood email offers a spam filter/tool. Customers will need to initiate the settings, as stated in instructions/FAQs. Note that any spam blocking feature could likely block emails that one might wish to receive, too.

In addition, I just recently saw a lot of good ideas in some of the articles listed at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/index.html

hope that's helpful

 

USAgal - Wow, thanks for the plug for the FTC's site....always good to know folks actually read (and use?) the information we put out there. (I work in the Division that produces the consumer education materials).

Snoopy - my personal opinion is that you cannot rely on your ISP to filter all spam. Many do a good job, but there's always some that slip through. Check to see if your antivirus, firewall, or spyware software provider also has a spam filter component. If not, get one - you'll pay a small amount for your sanity.

I use ZoneAlarm Suite - it takes care of antivirus, spyware, phishing, spam, and my firewall. I found it easy to install, maintain and update. Again, just my personal 2¢ on this. I'm sure the McAfee and Norton products are equally good. (as are others, too).