HELP! Drowning In EMail Floods

... it just keeps pouring in.

[austtr]

I thought I used to have a problem with spam email... boy, that was just the preliminaries.

It never stops!. Hundreds of them, usually multiple copies of the same thing. Delete one batch and another arrives.

I need help... how can I get some control over this? It's no longer just a nuisance issue, its starting to seriously interfere with my work sessions.

[fathom]

Most email accounts/interfaces have filters that you can highlight specific unwanted addresses and/or extentions.

Won't kill them totally but can dramatically reduce them.

[marcs]

Do a google search for spamassasin

I use it on a Linux desktop machine, they seem to offer Windows based solutions also. All in all, it is a pretty decent spam filter. I used to see 130-150 pieces of spam come in overnight, now it's down to 20 or so.

Still more than I'd like to see, but life is much better.

[Wilma]

Find the holes in your dike and plug them. A recent study pinpointed sources of spam:

BBC summary [news.bbc.co.uk]

Full report [cdt.org]

Anti-spam encoding on my site has worked great so far, as has having a form for email contacts. Most of what I get is via brute-force attacks (spammers try various letter combinations at a host). I get about 2 spams a day.

BTW when I encode mail links, I encode the whole thing, including the "mailto:" string. I also encode the link's CSS style name, since I named that "mailto". (I might change that...)

[StanBo]

A simple thing that works marvels for me - don't ever use
<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">[e-mail]</a>
anywhere on your sites, go for
<a href="mailto:name&#64;domain.com">contact name</a>
instead.

[creative craig]

Have a glance at this thread as well :)

[webmasterworld.com...]

Craig

[jim_w]

I have no mailto:’s on my page. I use a script file to send email to us, and the auto-reply for both email and the newsletter has a bogus from email address. The auto-reply says ‘do not send email to the above address, it will not be delivered. I get no spam, however, I have had ppl sign up for the newsletter and then unsubscribe in hopes of getting an email address to spam us with their info.

I also have my site setup so that I can just shut off an email account, and recreate another one in its place without too much trouble of changing various script data files. This way when the brute-force attacks for like [e-mail]. I just turn it off and make it [e-mail] or something and change one .pl file

[austtr]

Thanks for the above contributions... actually not long after I started this thread I remembered there had been a product that got some recommendations here several months ago.

Found it... its called Mailwasher. Loaded it up yesterday and it seems to be doing the job very nicely. It will take a few days before I get the filters correct but on the basis of the first 24 hrs, it looks very promosing.

No... I do not own it, sell it or act as an affiliate.