[Merged] NTL spam

[MetaWraith]

Originally Posted by homealone

I use mailwasher pro, I found that blacklisting & bouncing were a waste of time & now just use it to preview my mail boxes, before I download them, in order to delete the obvious crap.

I also found that forwarding mail for the account receiving the most spam, to my hotmail address, reduced the amount I get, considerably - talking 90% reduction

Once well trained and with well designed filters and accept/block lists I find mailwasher to be excellent. I have it auto-delete stuff on my block list, but still do a cursory check on things it's flagged as spam.

[Matthew]

I had 12 so far on my Yahoo account today. Its the first ever e-mail address I got and do not use it much not but I do not bother with Mail Washer anymore, I just let Outlook 2003 junk mail take control of it. I just add it to the blocked senders list and empty it once a week.

[greencreeper]

My stats for today, so far:

Date		# Operations	Spam	Passed	Whistlisted
Sun 3 Oct 2004	165		146	19	19

I receive 150 to 250 spam emails a day, from three email accounts (including one which has another account forwarded to it). Like Mike, I use Spampal - have done for years. The Bat! has common folders - i.e. folders that are non-account specific - so all the spam addressed to all my accounts goes into one folder where I give it a quick glance and hit ctrl-A and Delete.

[alanf617]

Odd.... I use Spampal and it first downloads the spam, then adds "**SPAM**" to the subject field so it's easy for Outlook Express to have a rule to pop it into my spam folder ( so I can double check before deleting). Can Spampal be used with an NTL account to delete it at the server? I find it's very accurate at sorting the spam, but it downloads the whole lot. Mozilla ( and something called "The Bat" ) seems to be very popular, I'll take a look, thanks.

And none of you have answered my question, are you all politicians?
;-)>
is it worth reporting spam or not?

[Matth]

Bouncing is WORSE than useless, as the sender address is invariably forged.

As I understand it, with Spampal, you can delete IMAP mail within spampal, but not POP.

If you are CERTAIN of your spam tagging, you could use a delete from server rule, but I'm not entirely certain if that would pass correctly through, or if there is a risk of skewing the numbering.

One thing, seems to be that the typical spam/bulkmail message-id formats are quite good predictors, and only need a small degree of cross-checking for legitimate bulkmail - or perhaps, secondary checking for known rotten IP ranges, like 24.0.0.0/8 , and perhaps the entire APNIC controlled range as well.

Mark it differently, and delete only that marking from the server.


Reporting:
To be honest, I used to report, now I've thrown a fairly solid blocker up - the days when spam had traceable sources are long gone, it's usually from an open proxy, on a "don't care" ISP, pointing to a website in "don't care" China.

Actually it looks like NTL might be despamming, as since I threw the block on my old Freeserve account (I used THEIR spam marking, with exceptions for any known good senders that were getting marked, and delete from server), I haven't noticed ANY spam at all - the ones that used to come through on both, don't seem to be coming through at all.

[alanf617]

WTF?
Can you put that into English please?

[greencreeper]

I delete spam and emails from mailing lists from the server, so the only copy is a local one. It prevents my inbox from going over its limit. All other emails I leave on the server. With IMAP you never download your emails, which is only of use if you don't mind NTL deleting them for good. I do

[evilind]

Just thought I would tell you that my tv internet email address yesterday had 83 spam messages sent to it. I just deleted the lot. First time I have known that to happen.

[greencreeper]

Originally Posted by alanf617

WTF?
Can you put that into English please?

He was talking about some of the characteristics of spam emails, which allows them to be identified as such.

[Matth]

The Regexp filter plugin for Spampal - NOT for the fainthearted - there is a preset ruleset for it, but it's rather "fuzzy matched".

[greencreeper]

Originally Posted by Matth

The Regexp filter plugin for Spampal - NOT for the fainthearted - there is a preset ruleset for it, but it's rather "fuzzy matched".

Agree There are loads of pre-set rules - I've added a few myself.

Originally Posted by Russ D

Isn't "bouncing" emails back the worse thing you can do?

I was tought that.

I use this http://www.spam-stop.co.uk/ try it free for 30 days then £5 per month after that. All spam is deleted at the server so nothing gets through to you.

Originally Posted by theblueraja

Not when he's bouncing it to his own hotmail account, which will have decent spam filtering before it reaches the inbox.

Bouncing them simply creates more traffic to overload mail servers - imagine if one million spams sent also generated one million mail bounces .

Originally Posted by Nidge

I use this http://www.spam-stop.co.uk/ try it free for 30 days then £5 per month after that. All spam is deleted at the server so nothing gets through to you.

Great if you want to spend £5 month, and give a stranger access to your mailbox. As I have said many times in all the Spam topics we get, there are plenty of free spam filters out there - the one I use is Popfile, and it's sucess rate is currently 99%.

FYI: Once you start getting Spam, it will normally continue as Spammers generally asume that any e-mail address they don't get a delivery failure for is a valid address.

Originally Posted by Paul M

Bouncing them simply creates more traffic to overload mail servers - imagine if one million spams sent also generated one million mail bounces .

Great if you want to spend £5 month, and give a stranger access to your mailbox. As I have said many times in all the Spam topics we get, there are plenty of free spam filters out there - the one I use is Popfile, and it's sucess rate is currently 99%.

FYI: Once you start getting Spam, it will normally continue as Spammers generally asume that any e-mail address they don't get a delivery failure for is a valid address.

No stranger gets access to your mailbox.