Forum Moderators: phranque
So setting rules for subject doesn't help. Reporting them didn't help either. Still tons of spam.
any ideas about how to get ride of that?
Anybody?
Just get new email addresses and don't use them for anything but personal correspondence. Don't signup for anything, don't buy anything with it, etc.
Get a yahoo or msn or hotmail email account for those.
It's a real problem, and those morons are destroying eMail as an effective means of communication.
Real spam filter usually only require at most 2 samples of a new spam style before they dump them all in your junkmail box.
You can also get external spam filters that filter emails before they get to outlook. Not outlook express if I remember right, has to be outlook.
You can also get ones that filter it out on the server.
The complexity of setting up each is in the order I listed them. Thunderbird 'just works'. I use it, have for a year, since late beta test stage. All my friends use it, spam is no longer an issue in our lives. Stick with inferior MS technology or move on up.
Re spam, actually, spam is down significantly this year, it's not expanding any more, that's because everyone who runs real bayesian type spam filters does not have spam in their inbox. People who used eudora have had this protection for years now. Only MS email clients, among the majors, do not offer real antispam filtering. Maybe 4 or 5 five years from now they will, if their 'progress' with MSIE 7 beta is any indication, that's only about 4-5 years behind the times too, once it's actually released.
I do have to check the spam folder every couple fo days to be sure that there isn't any important stuff that got misidentified.
WBF
Spammers use software to generate their spam content. That software leaves traces of itself, either in the text output, or in the html itself. Bayesian filtering builds a database of those traces, and those traces are what are blocked.
More or less anyway.
So in order for a spammer to get a spam by your filter, they have to change the underlying trace, or email constructor. They seem to do this about every 45 to 60 days, from what I can see. Very few of these guys actually do anything but fill out some forms in some software they buy.
Every time a new signature is detected, a real spam filter adds that to its database, and that's the last time you'll see any email with that signature. It's amazing to watch it work. Bayesian filtering is very old, and it works really well as long as you never make an error. But thunderbird has an undo/not junk function that removes that definition from the db.
It works. There's a reason spam emails dropped this year in the overall numbers, the new antispam technology works better than the email spam generating technology.
If you removed all outlook and outlook express email clients and replaced them with real spam filtering email clients, where you just push 'junk' to identify each spam, spam would slow massively. Once again, it's ms that is holding things back. The problem is largely solved at this point in terms of the technology.
Is there an easy way to do so?
Or is there Bayesian addons for Outlook express?
If you just want to test thunderbird, once you've installed it, just set each account to leave a copy of the email on the server, that way you can just switch back to outlook express if you for some reason don't like tbird. I switched from outlook express, made me nervous I'll admit, especially because I was beta testing it with my real email data, but it's stable now, has been for a while.
Also you can play with extensions for it, I don't use very many, just a few to make it do the behaviors I like. I am very conservative with upgrading email stuff, I waited I think a month or so before moving to tbird 1.5 for example. That also gives extension authors time to catch up.
It's not the same as outlook express even though it can be made to act very much like it, so it takes some getting used to if you've used OE for a long time. Keep in mind however that oe is a dead product, it has had no real development work done on it except security stuff for many years now. As you get used to a more modern client, you'll start to see the differences.
I have tested tbird on standard email users, and once I set it up to look like outlook express, and taught them how to use the junk mail filters, I've never heard a word from them about it. I ask now and then, and they are having no problems. And they are very happy that their spam issues are now becoming a faint memory. That's what happens when you switch, the problems you have now simply fade away, until you can barely remember when you used ms's antiquated stuff.
The only effective solution is to report the spam and have these criminal traced and punished. Trying to hide from spam is not working. You have to be active and do your part of the job. The most popular way is to use spamcop.net and report spam through their system. You have to be persistent a week or two to bring the heat under spammers and have them moved to another ISP. This, in most cases, will create real problems for these gangs as they are well known - [spamhaus.org...] - and not readily accepted by regular ISPs.
[edited by: wildbest at 9:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2006]
just try installing thunderbird
It works wonders - you just few of the spammy emails that get through and the filter learns :)
I disagree completely, it is working, and it's working great. Almost all spammers use proxies, botnets for smtp servers, and so on. They are very difficult to catch. It takes significant resources to hunt down and convict a spammer, that's why they tend to target the really big guys.
They busted one major guy recently, he was responsible for some huge number of all spams, maybe 10% or more. But you don't need to report those big guys, they know who they are, and they've been busting them. Spamhaus is doing a great job in that area. All ISPs, all IMAP email servers like hotmail, gmail, etc, are putting large amounts of money and energy into busting the big guys.
There has been nothing but good news and positive progress in the fight against spam this year and last.
And with tbird, you now have the tools you need to take control very easily of this situation on the client side. And server side similar tools are being used more and more.
One thing many spams have in them is embedded images that confirm to the spammer that the email has been viewed, and that the current email address is good. A good email address is more valuable than an unknown status one in the spam world.
If you never view any spam ever, your email address will drop in priority, and will eventually fall off the distribution cd roms of known good email addresses. This is not something that people generally understand about spam emails. It's critical to never view it in html mode. Tbird, unlike OE or Outlook, has a simple option to only use text mode for email viewing, unless you specifically want to view some email's html.
I can see this happening very easily. My emails have gotten on spam lists, but because I've never ever viewed them, the email address stays at a low status. So I don't get more and more spams, I just get a few, even though my email addresses are on various spam networks.
it helps to understand how these guys work and think, and what tools they use. There's a reason they are losing the fight. Aside from the fact that spammers are losers anyway, they don't have sophisticated tools. Just junk software. I use that too, I know how it works, but I don't use it to send spam.
[edited by: 2by4 at 9:25 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2006]
you just few of the spammy emails that get through and the filter learns...
Sick of pharmaceutical spam
I give my nod to SpamBayes. Kaspersky Anti-Spam seemed to work pretty good as well.
Use all the tools you have. Are you saying you shouldn't do that? That's a weird position to take. Normal users have no way to meaningfully report any spammer, fake return emails, fake sender information, fake everything. SMTP servers running on botnets or cracked servers, everything running through private proxies. What are they going to report? Some blackhat website that has no real way to find out who runs it? Get real.
What I'm talking about works, don't misdirect people into thinking it doesn't, I see it work, my friends see it work, and the web as a whole is seeing it working. You can take control of your end of spam. It works.
Not ever viewing a spam cuts down significantly on incoming spam over time. I can see this happen, it's simple. I get very few spams, as I noted, even though I've been on those spam lists for a few years.
<<< I give my nod to SpamBayes. >>
Any system that uses bayesian spam filtering works on the client, or on the email server side. Or both. Tbird uses bayesian filtering too.
[edited by: 2by4 at 9:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2006]
Almost all spammers use proxies, botnets for smtp servers, and so on. They are very difficult to catch.
That's not 'very easy', are you kidding? That's doable for experts in the field. And there's lots of hosters out there that cater explicitly to spammers and blackhats, they don't care who pays them. These hosters are known in the spammer world, and in the black hat world.
What is very easy to do is to install thunderbird and not see very many spams in your life again.
If you want to do the research and spend your finite amount of life time hunting down ip blocks, then finding out that it belongs to scum hosting company, and that the user is anonymized, etc etc, you're a hero and I take my hat off to you for spending that much time running after a moving target.
I think you're significantly underestimating how much botnets are being used for smtp mail serving, by the way. That's a pretty major growth industry. It's growing because email spammers know they can't be caught without huge resources if they use that method.
But for the rest of us, who dont' feel like doing that, I don't see any spam to speak of using the tools and methods I refered to. Do not underestimate the importance of never viewing images etc in spam emails. It took me a while to understand that part of it.
The ISPs and IMAP email companies all know about this, it cost them money, they are doing what you suggest, they have the resources to actually catch people, almost all spam goes through their systems at some point, so it's not like this is a secret or a mystery.
I know someone who told me what MS was doing with hotmail and spam. Leave at this: for legal reasons MS could not do what they were technically able to do when it came to destroying spammers systems.
[edited by: 2by4 at 9:46 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2006]
Needless to say, i was quite displeased. Has T-bird changed the way it stores mail? If not, from what I have experienced, there seems to be a big flaw here....
I have Outlook 2003 and have the default anti-spam stuff running and it seems to do a pretty good job of dumping most of the crapolla into the junk email folder....
You're right to bring that issue up though, that was a really serious problem.
That's not 'very easy', are you kidding? That's doable for experts in the field...
Filtering software might improve, but the spammers will continue.
My friends are having the same experience, they are also very happy, and no longer think about spam.
I'll repeat, again, however, how important it is to never view an image of any spam email. Really never to view it at all. That seriously cuts down on the growth of your incoming spam counts. My current experience shows me that I have seen basically a completely static count of spam come in over the last year. For example, I currently have about 15 spams in my junk mail box. I haven't emptied that in a few days. That's how many I always have, it doesn't change.
You can affect your spam profile on the web if you use discipline and never make a mistake. It's not out of your hands. However, a lot of users have emails so heavily contaminated by now that, if they can't just dump them, they will get very heavy spam. Nothing to do about that. I started fresh 2 years ago, except for some heavily private email addresses, which also started getting spam. But since I never viewed those spams, not only did that spam on those private emails slow down, it virtually stopped. This surprised me.
They send out test emails now and then designed to validate email addresses, to create the more valuable cd lists of known goods, a friend of mine's mom clicked on it, viewed it before she realized what she'd done. Now she's noticed a steady increase in her spams. Before she'd gotten almost none.
By the way, the ctrl+u view source option on tbird gives users the ability to very easily see the source at a single click. Getting to source one OE was I think a 3 step operation, plus resizing the source view window. Talk about primitive, and non user friendly.
My two pet peeves on OE were lack of text only default view mode, which also by the way stops almost all email born viruses, and the stupid process required to easily view source.
<<< o, I am not kidding! >>
Ok, you're not kidding. But if you think that's a 'simple procedure', you've completely lost touch with what average users can do, totally. That's an expert level procedure which I'd guess most webmaster world members are not able to do. If you think it's simple, that says a lot about your skill level. It's not simple, but it's nice to know that you have solid skills. Now try talking to some average users, start by explaining to them what an ip address is and how it works. Their eyes should be fully glazed over by the end of your first sentence.
I'll repeat, again, however, how important it is to never view an image of any spam email. Really never to view it at all. That seriously cuts down on the growth of your incoming spam counts.
Yes you can block images in OE, but why bother? It's a bad product, it runs the IE rendering engine for HTML, which you should know since you seem to be a bright boy. And that rendering engine is the number one attack method spyware/malware authors use. Using OE is not a smart idea, although, like with MSIE, with extreme care, you can avoid most issues. Not all, but most. Hopefully you're not actually defending OE, which has zero meaningful spam filter installed, runs IE rendering for HTML, can't shut off html view of emails, and many other weaknesses. If you like bad products, whatever, that's your privilege, I don't.
While I like tbird, because it does everything a modern email client should do, as noted above, eudora has done this for a long time too. Since tbird is free, and works really well, and runs on any os without major issues, it's what I recommend.
[edited by: 2by4 at 11:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2006]
I can't simply change email addys - it would be impossible to bring everyone up to date on it. Plus, it's on my site via an anchor on over 300 pages. Bascically, I'm stuck with it.
I've been using Outlook 2000 for years, and despite a number of attempts, I never got that ridiculous rules "wizard" to do anything for me (other than waste my time - I hate all of those MS "wizards" with a passion).
So, I dl'ed Tb 1.5 a couple of hours ago, and without me even having to train the filter, it's already caught and moved a few spam emails to the junk folder. Very nice.
One problem: I have over 4000 emails in the Outlook Inbox, and over 3000 in the Sent folder, and Tb is choking about 70% of the way through the import. Does anyone know how I can edit the Outlook folders to cut out the oldest emails and allow Tb to import things? I never trusted that autoarchive thing - Bill makes it impossible to know what you're actually doing until it's too late and things have been shuffled off to oblivion. The one time I tried it, I never found the emails afterwards - Jah only knows where they were. Accordingly, my email folders in Outlook are packed to the brim and Tb can't seem to absorb them all at once.
Here's what I'd do:
In outlook, create a new folder, call it inbox-storage say.
In that folder, create subfolders, make them chronological. Then transfer your inbox emails by date to fit the chronological folders. Nothing will change, you're just moving old emails into subfolders. You can probably move them back once it's set up.
But why? The old stuff you don't need direct inbox access to anyway.
Once you've rearranged the folders, close outlook, let it stay off for a minute to the data files write to hard disk, from ram.
Then reinstall thunderbird, choose the same import options. I have about 1/2 a gigabyte of emails and it did fine on them. No problems. Some folders have thousands of emails, but not as many as you have I think, maybe one does though now that I think about it.
I guess I don't really need all those emails in the Inbox, but I've liked having one giant, long history of my correspondence. It couldn't hurt to do some organising though.
