Does anyone have any tips on how to stop the flow of junk email from professional spammers & marketing companies? Is there some software I can buy to filter them out? Is there some internet authority I can report them to?

A few years ago the junk mail got so bad I just closed my then email address and opened a new one with another service provider. Following that I was a bit more careful about who I gave my email address to, and that seemed to work. However, a few weeks ago I joined Facebook and ever since I've been bombarded with American marketing emails trying to sell me all sorts of goods & services.

I've tried creating message rules to block the sender and/or block any email with certain words in the subject but these spammers keep sending the same junk from a different email address each day with slight variations in the subject. I don't want to change my email address again - so any advice on how to deal with spam will be much appreciated.

 

There are a few ways the spammers can get your email address. if your email address is up on any websites, the spammers use programs to trawl websites and collect email addresses. When you sign up a form to download free software/sign up to a website. Always make sure you click no to advertising material etc.

At work we get around spam emails using a purchased product called 'razorgate'. Basically what this does is everytime an email is recieved by the server, it sends a message back to the email server it recieved the email from using the information in the email message header. If it gets a response back then it is most likely a legitimate email server and not a spoofed spam email and it is let through. If it does not receive a response back then the email is quarantined/deleted as it has most likely come from a spoofed/fake email server. There are other rules it uses such as detecting heavy HTML content in emails etc.

For home i'm not too sure what you can do. The only way would be to attack it from the ISP level - hopefully they have something like razorgate running to screen out all the bullshit before it even makes it anywhere near your mailbox. it may be a case of calling them and asking for your email address to be included into the filtered group (hopefully). Apart from that i'm not sure what you can do from an end user perspective to block the spam emails; as you said they are from constantly changing email addresses, subjects and from spoofed SMTP servers.

 

the best spam prevention is a servel level prevention..
check out spam assassin, for instance.

who is your email service through?

 

Most service providers have an antispam offering nowadays. Some are included on your plan some are monthly fees (~$10). What you get is a service that gets rid of the known spam. You can still get some spam though.

I myself have a few email addresses so my ISP can't help me there. I could go to a spam filtering service which can filter all my addresses but I am have done a few rules that seem to be working well so far.

You can check one of the providers at http://www.spamcop.net/ces/individuals.shtml
You don't have to change your address(es).

What I have done is setup a rule that all email from people I haven't ever sent email to or that is not on my contact list or when the email is not addressed to my full name it goes into the spam box. I still get the spam (about 20/day) but it all goes into the spam box and only check it once or twice a day.

 

Thanks guys. My ISP is Telstra BigPond. They do have a "security" service that supposedly includes anti-spam but they want $99 before they tell you more about it.

The spamcop sounds more like what I need. I'll check it out later today.

 

Progress Report.

The flood of spam has now died down to a mere trickle. What I did was to use the message rules feature in Outlook Express to block senders and to divert emails with certain words in subject header and/or text.

So far - so good.

 

The problem with that approach is that there is a fairly recent trand from spammers to send emails with fake headers ("News report', etc) and random text for the text but with a picture attached at the beginning of the email. This picture contains the actual spam message. No rules can work this out unless you simply divert to junk folder anything that does not come from someone on your contact list.

But at least you are making progress .. :-)

 

These days you can buy your own domain name for around $USD 8.00 and have it hosted for very little indeed.

Then you can filter spam at the server level (the preferred way of doing it). Downloading spam and then filtering it client-side means the spammer is still stealing your bandwidth.

Spam Assassin or MailScanner (server side applications) will allow you to reduce spam far more effectively and quickly than setting up email filters in outlook IMO.

 

Yes, for a while there I was tempted do do that. However, the good news is that the spam has stopped completely. I suspect that BigPond may have detected them and put a block on them.

The spam started up within a few days of joining Facebook - http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook...0486443562.html

 

I'm on facebook and my hotmail (which I've had for 8years) doesn't get much spam and what it does get is filtered pretty well