Nine months email spam-free

[engine]

Nine months of zero spam to an e-mail address, until today. Somehow it has been harvested.

Harvesting can come from many places, including email sniffing, harvested from unprotected computers with contacts lists, or theft from a business database, amongst others.
Examples of company irresponsibility towards user data includes [webmasterworld.com...]

There's no doubt that now the e-mail address has been found, it'll start getting the torrents.

I did think that 9-months spam-free was pretty good going.

Added - and this news of a weakness In a registry [bbc.co.uk] as a result of poodle bug [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: engine at 4:52 pm (utc) on Jan 7, 2015]

[piatkow]

I have a separate address just for close personal contacts. It was spam free for years until until my cousin's computer was compromised.

The only way to be sure of being spam free is not to tell anybody the address.

[engine]

It kind of defeats the object of an email address if nobody knows it, but I know what you mean.

I thought 9 months was doing pretty well.

[piatkow]

I have seven addresses accessed through three mailboxes. Two are only used for specific business purposes and have stayed clean, three are in the public domain and two have always been regularly spammed. The other one and my two personal addresses stayed clean for long lengths of time until various people who contacted me had their PCs compromised.

The "friends and family" address has just over a dozen contacts which is what kept it free - you can imagine what I thought of my cousin. I have not enabled the "catch all address" option on any of my domains.

[tangor]

Spam is part and parcel of the web game. If you play, you eventually "pay"... so strong filters, ip denies, etc keeps it under control. I still get spam, but (looking at what gets dumped compared to what gets through) it is less than 1 percent.

Cross-tabbed against my "bad bots" list there is a 93% match, so I use both to manage my email.. and web sites. YMMV

[lucy24]

I did think that 9-months spam-free was pretty good going.

Each time I see the subject line I think: Your kids didn't start getting spam until after they were born? Well, that's something at least ....

[engine]

lol, yeah, perhaps i should have said 10-months. lol

I do have pretty good filtering, but i deliberately left all the filtering off for this address to monitor it.

I also use a lot of redirects. These mean that I can simply ditch a redirect should it get abused beyond the spam filtering. It also means i can track more easily where the address might have be passed on from. For example, there was one company that seemed to think it was ok to send it to other companies in their group. I watched as their nonsense escalated. They had unsubscribe links which didn't work. In other words, you could not get off their lists. What made it worse was that somehow, a spammer found the address and it got properly spammed.
The solution was to simply cut off the redirect. Problem solved for me. I'm pretty sure that the spam is probably still bouncing round the e-mail systems.

[piatkow]

The contrary problem is legitimate outgoing mail getting zapped at the other end. I have stopped sending invoices as email attachments and started using a cloud based system where I can see if the recipient has downloaded as I was loosing so many (probably not as many as the non payers claimed).

[Marshall]

I set up specific email accounts for specific purposes, e.g. domain name registration renewal notices. I white list the domain registrar's email address(s) and black list everything else (mostly gmail accounts as it happens to be the biggest offender). This technique has reduced my spam to almost nothing.

Marshall

[toidi]

Of all my eaddresses the least spammed is the one i have as a link on all my sites. I always thought it would have been brutally attacked.

[engine]

That's a good point, piatkow. It's commonplace for people to send invoices via e-mail. The spammers have caught on to this, too, and send their attachments with an evil payload.

[piatkow]

That's a good point, piatkow. It's commonplace for people to send invoices via e-mail. The spammers have caught on to this, too, and send their attachments with an evil payload.

And I NEVER put the word "invoice" in the message title as that seems to be another trigger for filtering.

[blend27]

I consider everything that I did not asked to be emailed to me as spam.

I use Aliases for receiving email that I asked for, e.g. if I buy something on the net I would first create an Alias and have the forward it to my real email. Once I am done with the transaction part, the alias gets nuked. If I need it later for some reason, i just recreate it - no mail in between, no special offers and no nagging - no distractions.

I use web based email only. It is backed up to a local Thunderbird db. Thunderbird archive with emails is located on NAS drive that is available only when the drive is UP. I don't open those emails, just back them up.

As for Family and friends who are mostly in tech field anyway: I kind of trained everyone that I don't answer my emails for at least 2 days, so if anything urgent - pick up the phone and call me, or send me a text.

+Greylisting.

I can not control what others do, but I can what I do.

No Spam! Simply kosher email box.

[engine]

Yes, the redirects, or aliases, work really well, and I do exactly the same thing. The difference is that I do leave them up to see if they get spammed.
It's so useful to be able to simply delete the alias if it gets abused.

Abuse comes not just from spammers, but from companies that just don't "get it."

[lammert]

Nine months is not bad for an email alias to be spam free, but everything depends on how you used it. One signup on the wrong system and the address will be in the hands of the wrong people.

I'm also using unique aliases for all signups on the internet. It makes it easy to track where the spammers got my address from. Forums and signups on non-profit sites are relatively save in my experience, but signups at commercial sites gives me the highest spam rate. Probably because they like to share my details with their "preferred third parties".

Using different aliases on all systems makes life also easier if one of those systems gets hacked and your logon credentials are stolen. Then it is just one hole to plug instead of several.

[jimji]

I must be missing something about this, because I have a number of accounts that have never been spammed. A couple of them are heavily used.

Oh, sorry -- as for how long, I am roughly estimating in the range of plus 5 years for a few. Maybe a couple at over 6 or 7 years. Actually, now that I think about it there must be a few that are over 10 years old and are spam free.

It seems from what I have read here that I must be doing something right.

[engine]

jimji, that's interesting. Can I clarify, do you mean you've never received anything? Is it being sent spam and you have good filters in place, or does it truly not get sent any? Perhaps you can enlighten us how you've done it?

I have an extensive set of filters in place and they work great, but I left them off that address as I wanted to find out how long the address would survive before a spammer harvested the address. I'll probably never know where the spammer got the address from, but the strongest likelihood is someone with an infected machine.

[jimji]

Okay, I just went and checked one to get some details. It will be 8 years next month since I opened that one and it presently has 2.96GB of stuff in it and to the best of my memory I haven't ever received spam to that one. I get a number of feeds — from the city, from a couple of entities at the national government level where I've had contract work. I get some other feeds, too. But going into too much detail would not be too cool, would it?

I don't think I do anything particularly special. I'm just always very careful. No filters.

But I have a lot of email accounts and about half of them regularly receive spam. In some cases, for research purposes, I kept records of when the spamming started and could pin down exactly why the spam started.

By a lot of email accounts I will confess it is a lot by any standard one might have — a few over 30 of them. I'm rather busy on the Net. Maybe 5 or 6 of them are used very little. Well, one almost not at all. Many are just like the one I checked, but maybe not quite as full as that one is getting.

I've had a couple of corporate accounts that were like some sort of spam magnet, but I know why. My website related email accounts have been pretty much spam free, except for one and that one I know exactly why it gets spam — the people on the news side are nutso. And I joke not. They draw in some rather weird folks in this world. A political thing, over on their side. But I don't mess about with them and they stay out of my side of that Net entity. But they sure cause a serious spam problem.

Again, I don't think I do anything special, except be really careful in all manner of doing things on the Net.