Community Newsletter: Q&A: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam
- 1/6/05 6:50 PM
It happened to me, here's what I did...
by metaluna - 1/7/05 1:38 PM In reply to: It happened to me, here's what I did... by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
You'll need to do several things, but none of these take much time. I've used a hotmail account for 8 years now and it has heavy spam filtering. When I suspect anyone of being a spammer or want to enter a contest, I use that address. I also bought Spam Subtract and it was only $20. (When I bought it many years ago, there were no freebie programs online for spam filtering because spam filtering wasn't a big issue like it is now) This program places an icon in your tray which blinks when it has stored spam or mail in question. You can right click the mail in it and preview before you release it to your in box or delete it all with one click. Spam Subtract is available online for a DL too. My ISP started filtering spam and that ended most of it. Be sure to run a few good programs like Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware also. Crazy...but it takes several methods to stop all of it! btw -- I bought a new PC (AMD Athlon) this year and the first thing I did when online was run both programs. I didn't even surf before I did that and there was over 2,000 finds of Spyware and Adware embedded!
spam
by rrh - 1/7/05 3:34 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I got rid of spam by buying prodict called spam fighter. ist danish product and is working well. they do have a free version. prize is app. 40 $. all spam from around the world is stored on a common database, so its is pretty efficient. once you have identified it, block it, you will never see it again. thoug some might accept some spam, it will then be removed from the common datadase and it will go into your spamfolder, where you manually will have to remove it. you will have a 30 day free trial, so try it out
regards robert hansen, denmark
Avoiding spam.
by abacus1966 - 1/7/05 3:39 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
It is a good idea to create either a Hotmail or a Yahoo email account, so if you suspect a site of being slighty dubious, you can simply give them one of these email addresses. At least this way you avoid any spam being sent to your primary email address.
Agree with abacus
by Rob10 - 1/7/05 6:36 AM In reply to: Avoiding spam. by abacus1966When I first started using Hotmail, I created a second account to use when signing up for just about anything (including Cnet's forum here). Four years later, my primary email account is still Spam free (knocking on wood!) My other account gets relatively little spam as well, though I do go through bouts of it. I just use Block Sender on everything and over time, it usually dwindles down to nothing. I suppose I'm lucky, but if my secondary account ever started getting bombarded longterm, I could always close it and start another.
Use Thunderbird, it's THAT simple!
by Peter Reaper - 1/7/05 4:09 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The next best thing after your ISP's spam filter (hopefully your ISP has one) is to have a good spamfilter built into your e-mail program.
And the best e-mail program is Mozilla Thunderbird. Not only does it have an adaptive (Bayesian) spam filter (which learn what YOU consider to be spam), it is also the best and most secure e-mail client there is. Plus, it's FREE.
I urge everyone to give Thunderbird a try:
http://www.GetThunderbird.com
BTW. The "filtering" and "blacklisting" methods that Outlook users must resign to are completely ineffective. That bears repeating: COMPLETELY INEFFECTIVE. Why? Because spammers NEVER send e-mails with the same sender name/address or subject line twice. Your filter just keeps growing, and thus eventually slowing your PC down, but the amount of spam is NOT reduced one bit.
Others have suggested to turn off HTML or the preview pane. With Thunderbird you don't have to resort to this crippling non-solution. In Thunderbird, simply select view as "Simple HTML" and it will block almost all malicious code while still allowing you to see the normal HTML formatting (bold, colors, images, etc.).
Try Thunderbird, and reclaim your inbox!
http://www.GetThunderbird.com
Spam filtering
by bjrackes - 1/7/05 4:25 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, I highly recommend Qurb, an inexpensive program that places mail from those outside your address book into a separate folder within the app. In the past I've tries other programs that set suspected spam aside, but always had to go outside my mail client to retrieve these and couldn't "accept" them into my address book without multiple steps.
NOTE: I hold no stock and know no one at Qurb.
Anti Spam Tactics
by BigJ - 1/7/05 4:47 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I discovered that one of the best ways to reduce spam is to enter the email address/telephone number/contact details of the company whose website it is that your signing up to.
I mean, just why does a software download site (or whatever) need my telephone number.
I love it!
by Kid A - 1/17/05 12:28 PM In reply to: Anti Spam Tactics by BigJThis is the Internet's equivalent of putting a telemarketer on hold... 
But seriously, I see no reason to provide too many contact details in exchange for a free download.
Respected companies might contact you via e-mail to inform you of updates and fixes. And a technician might call you to discuss a complex answer to an issue submitted via e-mail. But ultimately, software designers need to make money, too, so expect a few messages plugging other products or full-featured versions requiring the purchase of a license.
Let common sense guide you. If you are required to provide your phone number and mailing address to download a crappy screensaver, you can rest assured your phone will be ringing at dinner time!
Miguel K.
War on Spam
by donagain - 1/7/05 6:10 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
What I have done is use two Email accounts. One for family, ect. And one yahoo,hotmail,netscape,ect.for the rest with a good spam filter. Works great little or no spam in the family email.
Thanks Don
spam
by Mike1971 - 1/7/05 6:45 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
The best suggestion I can give you is.
Only give out that precious email address to family, friends, buisness asscociates. Like your cell phone number, home land line number. You can also go as far as to treat it like a credit card #.
I have a number of different free email addresses that I use to sign up for newsletters, free giveaways, etc.. Even when I signed up for those email addresses I already started recieving spam in them before I signed up for anything.
I guard my isp's main email account with my life, and my gmail.com account. Have never recieved spam in either 1 of them.
My yahoo address regularly get's at least 400 spams a day. Now that's a spam problem.
new email server reduced spam by 75%
by nealmiller1 - 1/7/05 7:24 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hi,
When my hosting company changed my email server to go to a new IP address due to unrelated problems with the email server software, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing my spam volume fall by 75% - it was a wonderful surprise. My spam catcher is MailFrontier Matador (client-side), and it's graphs show the decline very dramatically right after the server change occurred.
This was NOT due to any spam filtering on the server - it passes all messages flagged as spam through anyway. Just the change in the IP address seemed to do it for me.
Any comments or similar experiences?
Simple, Cheap Solution
by NM Glider Pilot - 1/7/05 7:28 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Folks, SPAM is a pain, but is easily dealt with. 1) Create an email account on one of the "freebie" mail sites (ie, hotmail). When registering for ANYTHING on the web where you even THINK you're gonna receive advertising from doing so, use your freebie email account (not the one you use for normal communication). 2) Since you are already receiving SPAM, use MailWasher Pro (no, I don't work for them - just use the product) to filter your mail. You eliminate the SPAM at the server BEFORE it gets to your inbox. The sofware "learns" who your friends are and has a database of known SPAMMERS that is updated regularly. This gets rid of the garbage before you have to read it all.
Great idea. Here's another that's just as cheap
by Gimmejazz - 1/7/05 9:17 AM In reply to: Simple, Cheap Solution by NM Glider PilotI've been using SpamFighter www.spamfighter.com for more than a year. It is free for personal use and plugs into Outlook and Outlook Express seamlessly (sorry, not available for Mac). It is community based and gets better with time. At this point, I get one or two spam emails a week. In all this time it has never erroneously culled out a message. I am very pleased.
SPAM Fighting
by tomlegal - 1/7/05 7:57 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There are a couple of things that I do.
I do not use my work email for any entries for email addresses that I put on the WEB.
I do not use the email address that I have from my ISP.
I use email addresses from Yahoo, Netscape, and HotMail. Yahoo and HotMail have very good SPAM tools. If there is something they thing is SPAM they put it in a JUNK folder. I look at the JUNK folder daily just to make sure there is something that was put in there by mistake. Sometimes they are put in there and the best way to make sure you get them is to put the senders email address in your ADDRESS folder and then you get them.
One last thing I do is I go through the JUNK folder and if there is a link to be taken off the list take it and put in the email address and OP-OUT. Believe it or not it does seem to work. The amount of SPAM (JUNK Email) I get has seemed to go down.
I really started to use the WEB based email because I travel alot and it was the best way to stay in touch since I could check the email from anywhere. Yahoo was the leader in doing what was needed to stop SPAM and it has been great.
Spam
by mad max - 1/7/05 8:24 AM In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I just try and remember the different company's that send this junk to me and make it a habit of never buying anything from them now, or later.
| Forum legend: | |
 |
Locked thread |
 |
Moderator |
 |
CNET staff |
 |
Samsung staff |
 |
Norton Authorized Support team |
 |
AVG staff |
 |
Windows Outreach team |
 |
Dell staff |
 |
Intel staff |
