Forum Moderators: phranque
I set up an email address for a specific site. It has never been used for any online forms or subscriptions, this morning I received nearly 400 spam messages, the bulk are from nice people who are concerned about making me more appealing to women ... and others simply want me to collect a small fortune they have waiting for me. Nice folk I'm sure.
If I unsubscribe, they breed.
It is driving me mad, I don't believe there is any form of body with teeth that can stop this vermin from breeding.
Any ideas?
She wrote back to the willy-enlargement people to ask if their product would still help if she had no willy, but the email bounced.
use a text only email client that reads the headers on the server. Delete obvious junk before even downloading. No pixel gif downloads, your name is removed from the list as routine list hygiene.
I get about one junk per day, okay truthfully I get two, but that's across two different accounts. I hear all about people with loads of spam, doesn't happen to me.
I use popcorn, free, lovely piece of work. Currently doesn't handle attachments, the author is thinking about that, may have happened already.
For attachment I use foxmail, anything but outlook express - that way my clients aren't installed in the normal places, and I don't have an address book sitting in the headlights.
Surveys show about 30% of online people have 2-3 email addresses, and discard them regularly as a means of shucking spam - so, many of the mainstream are pretty savvy. Just btw, when they let their account go, they let about 50% of their newsletter subscriptions go too.
Many, many users went to their profiles in Hotmail to find the 'share my details' option checked.
It seems that while there is money available from e-mail addresses, there'll always be spam. Not sure of Hotmail's reasoning in this case, whether it was a revenue exercise, or just trying another option to decrease the popularity of Hotmail (the free version).
2odd...
Also if you unsubscribe yes they know that your email address isn't bad easier, but if you don't reply they still know its not bad. When they don't get a bounced email they have a pretty good indicator that your email address is good.
My work sends out a newsletter weekly (30,000+) and I have a little experience with this topic.
They found me, they'll find you!
Having tried spam filters based on rules--eg similar to SpamAssassin--for the past month I've been testing the PopFile program which is based on Bayesian filtering. Previous methods trapped 90-95% of my spam, PopFile is catching 99.3% at last check.
It's worth checking out, as the strength of the Bayesian approach is that the spam filter is customized to your own individual email profile, not some average global profile like other methods.
You can read the theoretical background to Bayesian filtering on Paul Graham's site--paulgraham.com--and you can find PopFile on SourceForge.net
POPfile requires initial training--maybe 200 emails--before it begins to perform well. Looks like quite a promising solution if you want to keep an address you've had for a while. Only works for POP clients, not webmail.
On the basis that it needs 'training' is promising.
