Spam question/rant.

[Old and In the Way]

I'm getting about 100-120 spams daily. The subject line content breaks down roughly-

65 - buy drugs online
15 - sex
20 - refinance/debt consolidation
10 - hot stocks
10 - knock off watches

Question is, what's the point? How many people pick a spam e-mail and say, "OK....I'm buying". And why, particularly, the online drugs? Seems the benefit to time invested would be so nil as to make even managing an automated spam program a waste of time.

And whats with the domain names? I've watched them start with abelabel.com and progress through harryharry.com. I'm bugging my ISP to get some kind of front end SPAM filter that address these domains...how hard is it to write an antispam filter that analyzes the domain name and kills it before they get into my webmail account? Better yet, why don't the domain registering companies police this kind of bogus domain set-ups?

I've tried a couple of Outlook add-ons, but they hang/crash my Outlook program. I use the junk mail filter, but it seems not to do a whole hell of a lot.

I'm not ready to give up on Outlook, sorry...it works real well and I've never had a problem except for this nuisance. The time it takes is only a couple of minutesto deal with it...but still, it's the aggravation of making this a daily chore. I use Office XP.

[McKenzie]

1. try this for a start

You'll find that virtually all spam e-mails have spoofed headers (fake IP's show up if you open the header) so proggies such as Traceroute are a waste of time. For domains that spam you regularly there are ways of bouncing the e-mails back with an "address not found" message; there are proggies that will do it.

Around half of all e-mails are spam. The volume they send out chokes the highway and a large proportion come from the US. Around 5-6 countries account for around 90% of all spam. A complete pain in the arse.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

edit: It's a good idea to disable auto preview and .html in your e-mail client. Auto preview can be used to tell a spammer if the addy is live even if you don't open the e-mail. Disabling .html decreases the risk of someone who is not 'puter savvy clicking a hyperlink and connecting to a remote server. That scam is currently a fav trick. Bastards.

[Old and In the Way]

2. Thanks....I trying out mailwasher

On 1st glance, I'm not sure how much time saving this represents. Housekeeping would still be done, just in a different location. But the tools seem good and maybe the learning mode will eventually predetermine the spam mail without my intervention. Oddly, I couldn't import my Outlook address books which seems strange; no browse function to point it to the right folder, either.

I'm aware of the preview pane exploit and I don't use the html option, either.

Let's see how this works.

[trotsky]

3. Did you try the SpamBayes Outlook Add-In?

I used that for a long time and never had a problem - AND it grew to be extremely accurate determining what was spam.

I don't use Outlook anymore - I switched to Mozilla's mail client, Thunderbird. It has a Bayesian logic filter built-in and works very well too. Not quite as well as the plug-in for Outlook, but plenty good enough.

SpamBayes plug-in for Outlook: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net

Mozilla Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird

[Old and In the Way]

4. Thanks for the info.

If I were to switch to Thunderbird, do I have to disable the Outlook client info? Or could I run them parallel until I see how this software works. I assume that e-mails would get downloaded into one or the other client, depending which application is calling for the e-mail from my webserver. Is there any problems with running 2 systems at the same time?

[RoyGBiv]

5. Shouldn't be a problem ...

I set up a computer for two people who share it. I installed Thunderbird on it, but one of the people insists on using Outlook. So, both programs now run without messing with each other.

Unless you decide to make a switch, just don't let T-Bird set itself as your default client.

[ConsAreLiars]

6. You can run both, but

one or the other will be the "default" program that gets launched when you click an email address. The other will have to be started manually. The problem is that you will end up with some emails "in" both systems. I switched around for a while before settling on Thunderbird because it seemed very easy to use AND the trainable spam filrer (and because I like open source software since nasty tricks and susceptibility to hacking are monitored and fixed by a community whose values I share).

Thunderbird will import your settings from LookOut so setup is a snap.

(edit typo)

[trotsky]

8. One more note on using both simultaneously...

Make sure that one of them has its POP settings to "Leave a copy of messages on the server". Otherwise whichever client downloads it first will have the only copy.

Other than that, there should be no problems except those noted above.

[Old and In the Way]

10. I really like that Mailwasher software.

It's working as advertised. I've downloaded Thuunderbird, but I think I'm going to run with this solution, for now, anyway. I'm talking with my webhost about putting the server version on the front end of our webmail application.

Thanks for the tip!

[Old and In the Way]

7. OK, I think I'll try this Thunderbird.

Here's another question.

Is Mozilla Suite an integrated version of Firefox and Thunderbird? Are there pros and cons to running the applications seperately or going with the Mozilla Suite?

[bemildred]

9. I've had better luck with the integrated Mozilla package.

Which works great BTW.
I run Win98 and FreeBSD.
I had trouble getting FireFox to work right on my Win98 box,
which is highly tweaked, and went back to full Mozilla on both
OSes with good results. I ran it in parallel with Netscape (4.7)
for a while but finally switched over, it's better.

YMMV.