Spam

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Originally posted by jlfrs:
Who knows how to stop/reduce the nuisance of spam? I get about 30 spam EMails a day despite the company's dedicated "anti-spam" server, firewall and "sophisticated" blocking software.

The most worrying thing now is "threatening" EMails from people receiving spam from me! According to the I.T manager here, a spammer is "spoofing" my EMail address...

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The problem in most companies is that unless they have someone prepared to put in the donkey work (at our place that would be me!) decent anti-spam software costs a lot of money.

Do you know what it is that they use?

I've had great luck with postfix as an MTA running a variety of basic checks before even accepting email, and then passing it through spamassassin for checking and, if it's deemed to be spam, tagging.

I'd say if it is for use on your company email tread carefully.. different places have different policys but if something important gets shitcanned because you stuck in a DIY filter it could be bad for your health

cheers,
Paul

Outlook 2003 (and presumably some other products) has an 'add to blocked senders list'. Doesn't stop fresh spam of course but over time you will cut out the main offenders. Also it avoids the danger of consigning that vital email to the trash can by over eager anti-spam software.

What about Mailwasher, quite a lot of forum members here have said they rate it very highly
and the latest version I believe not only blocks e-mail from unwanted sources, black lists it and bounces it back so it looks as though it's been sent to a false address but also learns to recognise the sources before delivering it, it also has a feature that allows you to retrieve deleted mail if you should so wish. I use the older pro version and it's saved my bacon several times
oldie.

Try http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ its free and works but it does need training and works well with Outlook.

Thanks all - I'll take your advice, etc under consideration and implement what I can given the constraints of the network here.

I can't believe there isn't some form of legislation to outlaw this activity.

From my investigations so far, I've found out two things which seem to make a mockery of legislation:

1/As long as "certain" phrases are used, the spammers comply with law

2/I gather that most of these companies make their money by selling mailing lists to other spammers. The link at the bottom of the spam mail inviting the recipient to "be removed" only serves to confirm the EMail address as active. Whilst the recipient's address is removed from that particular spammer's mailing list, it is sold onto other spammers.

3/I understand that to merely open a spam EMail confirms to the sender that it is an active address through some sort of electronic tagging they use. It seems like common sense not to open spam but I'm getting rubbish which is disguised as business mail.

Much as EMail spam annoys, it's not as intrusive as mobile phone spam and I know of no other method to stop this other than to change numbers.

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Originally posted by Jez Quigley:
Outlook 2003 (and presumably some other products) has an 'add to blocked senders list'.

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Outlook 2003 also has a built-in spam filter that seems to be pretty good at avoiding "false positives" - moving genuine mail into the spam folder.

It does allow a small percentage of spams to leak through, but it's impressively good.

cheers, Martin

E-mail:- MartinPayne (at) Dial.Pipex.com. Put "Naim" in the title.

One of my friends told me that at his place of work,(an American credit card company), one of his colleagues was fired for the sort of spam he received,(this was about 3 years ago).

This was on the basis that he must have been accessing sites of an "unpalatable" nature on his p.c at work because the spam he was sent was "extreme".He was reported because the company's firewall stopped the flow and the spam was delivered into a file where the I.T dept. checked it.

Whether this was the case or not I don't know but it's worrying to think that a company will impose this level of punishment for something an employee has little or no control over.

Here where I work, we had one of our subsidiary's Websites being bombarded with 20,000+ spam Emails a day. It was thought the sender wanted that Website address for his own.

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Originally posted by jlfrs:
3/I understand that to merely open a spam EMail confirms to the sender that it is an active address through some sort of electronic tagging they use. It seems like common sense not to open spam but I'm getting rubbish which is disguised as business mail.

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The mail contains html which once read by your email software causes the program to fetch data from the spammers html server, at which point it logs your ip address, reads the mail address from the page you've opened (in the mini browser that outlook opens) and logs it as good

Outlook 2003, for example, doesn't process the html, by default. An even better bet is to use another mail client (eudora, for example)

cj