19 Jun 2003 | Derek said...

I just use MailBlocks.

I've been using it for less than 3 weeks, and it has blocked 100% of my spam so far (over 700 emails). It imported my old address book so all my current contacts will not be asked to verify themselves, and I have the contact forms on my web sites setup to be automatically accepted to my inbox. Also if I email someone, they are added to the accepted list. So the only people that leaves that will be blocked are the spammers... And if someone didn't get put on my list, they just enter a 7 digit number to verify themselves, and then it's email like normal. Plus it's web based unlike some other similar solutions, and only costs $9.95 for 3 years.

I promise, I do not work for MailBlocks

19 Jun 2003 | jeremy said...

For instance, those pesky telemarketers can be repelled by dropping just the first note of the ?disconnected tone? on your answering machine. When telemarketer computer programs dial you up they hear the tone, assume your number is no longer valid and erase you from their database. Soon enough you are no longer afraid of picking up the phone.

This is no longer true. As soon as this practice became widespread, the major manufacturers of auto-call machines for telemarketing created workarounds for their newer versions of the equipment. I apologize, but I cannot find the news article describing this, though I believe it was on NPR sometime in the last 6 months

20 Jun 2003 | p8 said...

If you have widows you cold check out Mailwasher ro from zonelabs.

" Unique to MailWasher Pro is the ability to "bounce" spam messages back to the sender and reduce future spamming. Start getting your email address off mailing lists. Bounced messages are sent via your ISP's postmaster, so it looks exactly like it has come from your ISP and not from you at your address. It is like a tele-marketer learning your phone number is disconnected."

I'm using the open-source spamihilator myself:

" The new Learning Filter (Bayesian Filter) uses the rules of Thomas Bayes (english mathematician, 18th century) and calculates a certain Spam-Probability for every eMail. You can train this filter! So it will know your messages even better than you and continuously increase the recognition rate."

20 Jun 2003 | p8 said...

uhm, I mean windows not widows and mailwasher pro not mailwasher ro.

20 Jun 2003 | hurley#1 said...

Unique to MailWasher Pro is the ability to "bounce" spam messages back to the sender

That feature is built into Mac OSX's free Mail program as well, although you have to bounce the messages manually by selecting them and choosing "bounce to sender" from a menu.

20 Jun 2003 | Kristian said...

I'm seconding jeremy's assertion that the Telezapper and similiar products were very nearly DOA. I was working for a telemarketing firm when the Telezapper came out and mentioned it to my boss. He just laughed about it and said our dialer had already been patched to bypass it.

20 Jun 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Allow me to chime in from the perspective of a company that sends mass e-mail to those who opt-in for it.

We have now found that our e-mail newsletter is being blocked by some spam filters. So, we now have to include a note on the sign-up page to instruct users to adjust their anti-spam filter.

I can just imagine the calls I'll be getting, asking me how to configure three dozen different anti-spam filters. ARGH!

20 Jun 2003 | JS said...

This is no longer true. As soon as this practice became widespread, the major manufacturers of auto-call machines for telemarketing created workarounds for their newer versions of the equipment.

I've heard this one. It is true. But as anyone who has seen this played out on virus software, or even the spam front, it is not the end of the story. Of course nobody actually learns anything from history (knowledge work as it is) so we reinvent the 'adaptive' wheel every single time this plays out. I remember the first time experimental spam and ad blockers came out and were gotten around -- same argument.

20 Jun 2003 | LukeW said...

So, we now have to include a note on the sign-up page to instruct users to adjust their anti-spam filter

I've become so trigger happy on the delete key (getting 50-100 spam slams a day), that I have lost important messages. There is a fine blurry line between the subject lines of spam and legitimate e-commerce mailings. "Re: Your order": often just nets me a spam sandwich with extra generic viagra.

and bummer that the telezapper no longer works. I never had the device, but I did put the first tone on my answering machine and have not had a telemarketer buzz me in over 8 months ... nonetheless... this part of my post is plenty dern funny.

20 Jun 2003 | Joshua Kaufman said...

I changed my primary personal email address last year and made absolutely sure not to submit it on any web forms or give it to someone that I didn't know personally. For web forms that require emails, I created an alias that forwards to my primary email. When the alias starts to get spam, I'll just delete it and create a new one.

I haven't received one piece of spam since I started doing this. It seems to be just a matter of time before I get spam because I've heard that some spammers are able to intercept Internet traffic to gather emails.

I realize that this option isn't available for everyone, especially those who have work emails they can't change. For those who are willing to give up their primary email address and have their own hosting provider, it may be worth a try.

20 Jun 2003 | Darrel said...

The newest version of Eudora supposedly has spam filtering.

Haven't played with it yet.

20 Jun 2003 | Cade Roux said...

I'm using the (free) Spam Bayes plugin for Outlook for just the last 24 hours - it looks really good.

20 Jun 2003 | pb said...

The MailBlocks approach is dumb. I get numerous unsolicited, personal email that I would be embarrased to have some stupid spam blocker bounce back to the sender for verification.

My experience with Bayesian with MacOS mail.app is that it has been 100% *incorrect*. Every single message it has determined to be spam has been legit.

The best approach, IMO, is Cloudmark. It has gotten to about 95% blocking with

20 Jun 2003 | hurley #1 said...

My experience with Bayesian with MacOS mail.app is that it has been 100% *incorrect*. Every single message it has determined to be spam has been legit.

Wow, that's exactly the opposite of my experience. I've been using spam filtering in my Mac OSX mail ever since that feature appeared (a year ago?) and it has worked almost flawlessly. It lets a small number of spam messages slip through, but I can think of only one or two messages over the past year that it marked incorrectly as junk.

20 Jun 2003 | Chris said...

I changed my primary personal email address last year and made absolutely sure not to submit it on any web forms or give it to someone that I didn't know personally. For web forms that require emails, I created an alias that forwards to my primary email. When the alias starts to get spam, I'll just delete it and create a new one.

I haven't received one piece of spam since I started doing this. It seems to be just a matter of time before I get spam because I've heard that some spammers are able to intercept Internet traffic to gather emails.

I thought about doing this, however, I get all email sent to incorrect address on our domain (as the IT dude). So if I delete the alias, I still get the spam. I guess I could change the alias to send somewhere else, but if that email bounces, I'll get it back still. I decided not to go this route and simply installed Mailwasher. It seems to help, but I still get atleast 300 spam messages every week.

How do I win this situation?

20 Jun 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Where does one find this free Spam Bayes add-in for Outlook?

20 Jun 2003 | Derek said...

The MailBlocks approach is dumb.

I setup a separate email for the unsolicited messages with Mailblocks. I put [email protected] on my business cards, letterhead, etc. It allows all email to come straight to me without the filter.

But I use [email protected] for everything else, which does filter. So people still rarely have to do the authorization thing, and even then it's only one time. I've had no complaints, and to me it's worth the 5 seconds it takes someone to fill the form out for 400 spams a week to be blocked.

It's the only 100% accurate solution I've ever come across...

20 Jun 2003 | LukeW said...

Incidently the cover story of the current MIT Technology Review magazine is titled Spam Wars:

Can E-Mail Be Saved?
In their online dialogue on the scourge of spam, ISP maven Barry Shein and e-mail standards pioneer Dave Crocker grapple with whether the cure may be as bad as the disease.

20 Jun 2003 | Steve said...

Maybe I have a higher tolerance for this stuff, but I just don't feel like I get that much spam. It helps to be in domains other than the big ones - especially anything related to AOL since I still believe that they are covertly encouraging the stuff. (My brother set up a test account there once - never used it, never posted it anywhere or used it to sign up for anything, and he received spam anyway.)

I tend to use one email address for correspondence and one for ordering crap, registrations, etc. And even then it doesn't get that much spam - a few messages a month, I would say. Maybe I'm just leading a charmed life.

20 Jun 2003 | rog said...

Where does one find this free Spam Bayes add-in for Outlook?

here

I use it as well, and it works pretty well. Takes a bit of training, and it's not 100% -- probably closer to 90%. Combined with the SpamAssassin our IT department just deployed on the server, I'm nearly spam-free now.

(disclaimer -- I work for the company who just bought spamassassin, but I don't work on that product nor do I sell it.)

20 Jun 2003 | Karl said...

I dunno -- I think a legislative solution will be forthcoming, but it'll come from the states and not from the feds.

For instance, Oregon has a "No-Call" list. It's $6 to join it and $3 per year. Once you're on the list and after it propogates to the telemarketers, you get blissful, blissful silence. We've been on it for a year and a half and it's worked perfectly.

The key is to have a state DA that cares about it and is tech-savvy enough to figure things out. Our DA got pissed off and closed *all* of the loopholes that existed in state laws for telemarketers, and then issued some blistering opinions about the laws that he couldn't get rid of. This forced the courts to heavily fine offending telemarketrs.

When a DA pops up that 'gets it', that's when spam will be attacked. It's not like these people can't be found and can't be prosecuted -- in fact, it's rediculously easy to trace offenders. It's the fact that no one in our government wants to get off of ther tuchkus and close the loopholes and solve the legal problems.

20 Jun 2003 | dave said...

I just set up a spam filtering relay for our office.. I used postfix with a lot of its built-in filtering (Internet Blackholes, DNS lookup, etc) with SpamAssassin & amavis-new for SPAM filtering & virus scanning. It forwards all mail after scan to our Exchange server. A nice, free solution that took me an afternoon to set up.

22 Jun 2003 | Wilson Miner said...

An interesting model for any spam legislation is the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The law, which prohibits "any telephone facsimile machine, computer or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine" was recently challenged by two companies in Missouri on free speech grounds and ruled constitutional in district court. Nice law, but damn if we don't still get fax spam every now and then. My favorite is the ones for toner cartridges. Sell me toner for my printer while you waste toner in my fax machine. Super.

Still, something's got to happen. My grandma uses AOL (god bless her) and pays 4.95 a month for 3 hours. That's all the time she needs to check and send e-mail which is all she needs to do. But if she doesn't log on for a while, by the time she gets to her inbox, she has to spend 30 minutes fishing through porn and viagra ads to find the mail she wants to read. Why the crap does my grandma have to look at porn to use email?

As far as spam filtering at the user level, the only method that works for me is just to never put my email in a web form or online directory. Ever. To anybody. In college, my e-mail was in the school directory, and it got doused with spam. Now I do what Chris does, and use an alias to sign up for things where I need to actually get the emails. Then when the alias starts to get hit, I'll set that one to start bouncing and start a new one. Like magic.

22 Jun 2003 | Wilson said...

Yeah, Kansas has had a (free) no-call list for almost a year now, and it's been shockingly effective, except for election season, since politicians are of course exempt.

23 Jun 2003 | pb said...

Since this can be solved technically, why don't we leave the legal system out of it?

23 Jun 2003 | Wilson said...

Until my grandma or a 6-year-old can solve it technically, it ought to be illegal.

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