Forum Moderators: phranque
Because of this, junk mail is never going to go away. Software filters are less than perfect, especially if you're running a business - I find myself having to look through the junk mail folder every day just to make sure it didn't accidentally catch any "real" messages - and usually it does.
There are the "black lists" where you can use their DNS and omit messages from known spam-friendly sites, but lets face it - those "spam bullies" have a lot of legitimate/victimized hosts on their lists which blocks out a lot of innocent users. Plus spammers are creative and even when you're using an RBL you still get spam.
Last but not least are the services that middle-man your e-mail ... sends a reply back to the user to make them click a link, then lets the message through. This seems to be the most effective way to eliminate spam, but then you miss out on automated messages or order receipts unless you remember to add those domains manually.
So what's next? Can SMTP be "fixed" or is it time for a new protocol entirely? Something like those third party filter services, but built into your mail server software? I don't really have an answer I just know that what exists right now isn't efficient.
The problem is not so much a technical one - there must be a number of solutions to spam - so much as a political one (in as much as every developer on the planet would have to be convinced to drop SMTP for the new protocol).
Would you be willing to give up your mail client for an untested new fangled program that only 0.5% of users could contact you through? Plus the problems of getting MS, Mac, Linux and all the others to work together. Heck, they can't even agree on a standard html protocol! :)
There are the "black lists" where you can use their DNS and omit messages from known spam-friendly sites, but lets face it - those "spam bullies" have a lot of legitimate/victimized hosts on their lists which blocks out a lot of innocent users.
No intention to change your opinion here but this only proves that it is effective against the spammers. So much so that spammers are trying all means to get legitimate hosts get listed.
What they are doing is that they probably register for tonnes of mailing lists with a handful or more of email addresses. When they get emails from these lists, just report them as spams. When these sites that are providing the blacklist gets too much reports of spams, they blacklist the IP address.
But they (the spammers) can only keep the IP addresses in the list for that long because once over a period of time, if there are no reports, the IP addresses get delisted. I only use the blacklist from openrbl, spamhaus and spamcop because this is the way they work. Others, I know that they may not delist.
Recently, due to this issue, spamcop has changed their reporting to only allow from those who has registered their email addresses so that users can only report emails as spam when it is sent to that address that they registered and not any others.
Thus if spammer wants to blacklist an IP address, they will need to register many email addresses with spamcop and they have to filter which email address to report the spam, making it harder.
Plus after all that work, the IP address gets delisted within days. Spammers are lazy, minimum work, maximum results is their motto.
So blacklist is still effective in my case.
