Spam

it's finally happened

[Lovejoy]

Anyone else up to their ears in spam? Well after receiving a slew of ".Gif spams" this month,ten years of battling spam setting filters, downloading the latest antispam software and constant vigilence I've had enough.

Today I set my filters the opposite of what I have been, from "if the #*$!x contains" to "if the subject doesn't contain". So if the subject isn't directly related to ten products I sell , or from my affiliates it's off to the trash and be damned......

[JollyK]

I did that on one of my domains. There's only one email address (other than postmaster) that accepts mail, and that is the one that is used by my web contact form. I change it periodically.

All other emails bounce with "Sorry, due to spam, this address is blocked. Please use [my_domain...] to contact us."

That way, legitimate people will at least have the contact method if they still want to contact me.

And yes, I may lose some people because of it, but it was just getting out of hand.

(It still is out of hand on some of my other domains.)

JK

[Rosalind]

It is out of control on some email addresses, to the extent that I have had to delete a handful and just create new ones. I guess the shelf-life of an email address is getting much shorter, no matter how careful you are with it. All you have to do is mail someone who later opens a virus, and that's it.

I can't imagine putting a mailto: up on a website now, and it amazes me that so many people are still doing this.

[joaquin112]

The safest way is with the use of a form to redirect e-mail to a secure-never-before-used e-mail. That works 100% of the time.

[Lovejoy]

Just an update, the changes worked the spam is back in the can, even the GIF spam. I did have a few legitimate
mails get sent to trash, but they were regarding a couple of products I'd forgotten to list. So far so good.

[MichaelBluejay]

Another way to do it is to set up a .procmail filter that trashes any mail that comes in with a .gif attachment (or that auto-responds to the sender telling them you don't accept messages with attachements, and why). Me, I allow GIF's but not .pif, .exe, .cmd, or .zip.

[stapel]

How do you define "up to your ears in spam"? My highest volume was about 150K messages in one twenty-four-hour period....

Eliz.

[Lovejoy]

Hi Eliz,

It's not so much the numbers, it's the percentage of spam vs legitimate mail. In my case it's now running 90% spam, 10% legitimate business mail.

[stapel]

Lovejoy said: ...it's now running 90% spam, 10% legitimate business mail.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Eliz.