Stick your spam up your a$$

[kasar]

i seriously think someone should start vigilante action against the spammers

ie.
post their address on the net
post their phone numbers
post their email addresses on the net so they get shitloads of spam


i know some of these things are "illegal" but i'm seriously getting pissed at there bastards. todays hotmail count: 65 spam email (plus the 40 that hotmail filtered)

[Iroquois]

How about having one personal e-mail address, and a lycos/yahoo/hotmail one that you use for random registrations to web-sites that you only intermittently use.

Only put the personal one in web sites that you really do trust, use the other one when you have a stronger inkling that it may end up being spammed.

Pretty simple, really. I've managed to protect my personal e-mail address quite well from spam in the year that I've had it.

I get two spam e-mails, every day, at the same time, from the same senders. It's not worth responding, because you will end up with more as it flags you as being alive, like other people have stated. I have these two regular messages 'filtered' to go my Trash.

Now, if only I had a similar mechanism on my regular mail (i.e. for phone bills ), I'd be happy.

[Rt!]

i never get much spam...
my 2 uni emails may or may not be filtered. im not sure.
my isp email - never get any mail there

and the email i use gets like less than 4 spam messages per year - its on my laptop which is running exim, and if I wanted to I can just change the username and email

[Draffa]

I just use the aforementioned MailWasher. If it even looks sus, BAM, bounced back to where it came from Not only does it mean I don't have to download it just to delete it, it also means my elaim is flagged in the spammers DB as being inactive/nonexistant.

[Rogue]

I have several ISP-based email accounts, two domains I own (so unlimited accounts there) and a Hotmail account. I never check my hotmail, I only keep it active for Messenger.

As for my other accounts, I average about 10-15 spam emails a day across all of them. I use several layers of protection:
Spamtrap.net - mail filtering service - gets about 50-60%
MailWasher - bounces spam based on rules - gets another 20-25%
Matador Outlook plugin - gets about 10%

On a good day, these filters will stop all spam, and on a bad day, I'll see 3-4 messages sneak through.

Spamtrap is a great pre-filter service, as it filters the messages based on fingerprints, and does it transparently to my POP client.

Mailwasher has some great features, including the ability to use blacklists from various sources to filter your mail, create your own blacklists & rules, and bounce mails back to the recipient to make your address look non-existant.

While contact the webhost can work well, a lot of spam comes out of Korea and China, where there is no regulation and no requirement for the webhost to act upon your request. I find it easier just to block all known IP ranges from those countries.

[Blakey]

I can't believe noone's mentioned Cloudmark yet.

As a result of a couple of years posting on newsgroups without a mangled email address I get around 10+ messages a day at least.

Ever since I've installed the Cloudmark plugin for Outlook (also for OE) everything gets filtered straight to the spam folder. It uses a distributed database, i.e. the first time a new spam mail is received a user blocks and reports it, and it's added to the database, so when the next person receives it, it's filtered.

3 thumbs up.

Blakey.

[DonTryThis@Home]

I've discovered a great method of getting back at spammers.
I've got my own domain and hosting, which comes with unlimited email aliases, ie. whateveryouwant@mydomain.com.
By default, everything comes through, but I can choose to redirect certain aliases to wherever I want.
So whenever I put my email address into a website, I use a unique name for that site, such as ocau@mydomain.com. (not that I'm saying OCAU would spam, or pass emails to spammers, just using an example.)
That way, when I get spam, I can look at the address, and see who passes on my email address to the spammers, and also start to redirect the spam directly back to one of their email addresses.
It's not the easiest method for everyone, but it works a treat for me.

[phazed_4u]

with all the money our favourite IT minister has spent on his website, i think a good idea is some kind of submission service,

where we can dob in pain in the posterior spammers and have the government strong arms go and raid their house and spray their face heavily with Pepper Spray and then beat them to a bloody pulp,

and then the submitter of the website is publicly praised for making australia, and the world, a better place to surf the net...


EDIT: *wiped mouth with TP*

[antomathy]

i just wanted to reply saying FUCK (sorry bout language but i cant help it)

spam for me is gettinggod dam out of control. im using my good optushome.com.au email account so i cant really change it, i got a few hundred people on my block list, i try sending emaisl back saying take me off your list but i just get sent more crap

now i get roughly 15 - 30 spam mails a day. its really pissing me off..

is there anyway that optus can filter out spam before it gets to us..

fark!#$!$#

no i dont need viagra, i dont need a home lone, i dont want "Free porn site"

ffs i have had enough

[d_hall]

Perhaps if we set outlook/hotmail etc to redirect all spam directly to Senator Alston (and CC Johnny) then they might take it a little more seriously?

[MR CHILLED]

Firstly I really dont beleive there is any way to avoid it, merely just minimise it. Even if you dont put your email address out there there are search engines (bots) which "guess" email addresses and spam those constructed email addresses.

For example I get included in the same one spam email addressed to the following many people:

nick@blah.com.au (my address)
nicks@blah.com.au
nickss@blah.com.au
nickssr@blah.com.au

I think they have algorithyms such as:

{Get isp list from database = isp}
{Get person name from database = name} 

address1 = name@isp1
address2 = namea@isp1
address3 = nameb@isp1
address4 = namec@isp1
.
.
.
addressN = namez@isp1

isp = isp2

REPEAT LOOP

So it would appear that these engines are constructing email address - not sure if this is exactly what they do but it sure looks like what is happening from the spam im receiving.

Also im not sure that bouncing emails back to their origin via programs like Mainwasher is very effective. These email bots are pumping out the emails all the time and im sure they are programmed to just delete all returned email anyways - whether it be legitimate users returning hate messages or people bouncing email back. So either way im sure it doesnt matter to the email engine.

In the last 6 months Ive been furiously bouncing spam emails back to origin using Mailwasher, the amount of spam emails has NOT decreased. The only way I can somewhat control it is to automatically delete spam from blacklisted domains Ive specified and use filters (for later deletion) to pick up the ones that get through (in Mailwasher there doesnt appear to be an auto delete for messages picked up by the filter, only auto delete for blacklisted domain emails).

Once your email address is out there, your history.

PS: These are only my thoughts and theories - feel free to challenge them as im not wholly sure what Ive said above is correct, just ideas on how spam works

[lench]

i get about 80 in my hotmail per day it cant help much when the addy was created back when i first got the net but at least its on exclusive mode
im gonna have to gather all my email one day if it doesnt stop growing and for each email i get i send it back to the company 1000000 fold >strokes devil beard< it might not work but at least i did something
but lately ive been seriously thinking about just creating my own hosting service. could be interesing to see how far i get hehe

[d_hall]

Originally posted by lench
im gonna have to gather all my email one day if it doesnt stop growing and for each email i get i send it back to the company 1000000 fold >strokes devil beard< it might not work but at least i did something

The problem with that is that half the time they have hijacked some innocent person's email to send the messages, so you'll just be piling misery upon some poor fellow victim.

[stewpot]

Originally posted by kasar
i seriously think someone should start vigilante action against the spammers

ie.
post their address on the net
post their phone numbers
post their email addresses on the net so they get shitloads of spam


i know some of these things are "illegal" but i'm seriously getting pissed at there bastards. todays hotmail count: 65 spam email (plus the 40 that hotmail filtered)

It's already been done. This page will give you a warm fuzzy feeling.

[Shalmanese]

Rule based filtering doesnt work. the first 5 rules gets rid of 90% of the spam but that last 10% is almost impossible to remove via rule based.

Have a look at Baysean filtering. Have a look at some of the work done here: http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

He reports a 99.7% hit rate with only 1 false positive so far.

I believe the current version of Mozilla mail uses Baysian filtering.

Personally, I have been extremely lucky. Ive had my uni account for 18 months now and I have been fairly indiscriminate in where I give it out yet I can could the number of spam's I have gotten on 1 hand (3 so far).