Spam

[Guest]

I do just that. My ISP allows maildelivery through SMTP (in addition to POP3), allowing me to run my own mailserver (which is of course shut tight, allowing only the IP ranges in my LAN and the mailserver from my ISP to even connect to it).It has built-in mailfiltering, which currently blocks several hundred domains (including some entire countries).That way I block about 200 spam messages a week, with maybe 100 more getting through (from new addresses not yet in the list, but it doesn't take long to add them :-jumpy).Not ideal, I'd rather have some automated system included to save me some work, but it's effective.Mailwasher seems nice, but works only on POP3 connections. SMTP allows me to bounce the email as if it were incorrectly addressed without ever getting the message over my line (with POP3 the entire message has to be downloaded before you can get at the headers, with SMTP you can download the headers only and bounce from those (which also tells the other server to delete the message).

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

The methods used by both Jwenting and yourself sound a little technical to an innocent such as me. For that reason at a cost of

[Guest Edam]

>Remember, most spam is from a few companies who are paid by >the company to market them - and they usually use offshore >servers - .ru is very popular, and so is china.com. And the >mailers are usually just some kid in a basement either with >a mail server - so no controls whatsoever - or free access >to someone else's offshore. Ha! Tell me about it. I'm the e-mail administrator at my job and there is a certain spammer from Taiwan who is relentless. I set up the firewall to block his numerous IP addresses, most of them from Hinet, and it's apparent that he doesn't even know that he is being blocked. He has made over 4,000 attempts in the past two days to connect to our mail server. "Kid in a basement" for sure. BTW, he sends a message with a link to an Oriental porn site, and it's not even a good one. Oops! (j/k) Scott, I use Eudora Pro also, but the advantage to using Mail Washer is that you get to block them BEFORE the mail arrives. This decreases the possibility of receiving a new virus/worm that would be undetected, or inadvertantly opened if the subject line is clever enough to make you do so, otherwise.

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

Mike,Good news for you. I have found that it is possible with my filter company to block ISP or domain names. I did it using the filter company

[Guest]

Cool. I think I need to look into it. Oh, and the unsubscribe option seems to work for most of the junk. I et a lot less junk now that I unsubscribed from most of them. There are still a couple of them though. Thanks for the info.Mike

[Guest]

Being somebody who administers the messaging servers for a living, I'll give you a tip or two, as well...If you're able to get your mail vai SMTP, then you may wish to consider signing up with an RBL... and you also need to make VERY sure that you've got your server locked down pretty hard to avoid relaying mail out. Realtime blackhole lists will, occasionally, "throw out the baby with the bathwater" but they do work well. Most folks who blast spam out do not use their own ISP to send this garbage. If they were to do so, they'd find their accounts shut down in fairly short order.The relay problem is where most of this lays. In order to use SMTP, you've got to have port 25 open. Unless you're in a position where you can afford to have your inbound and outbound SMTP traffic on different servers, you must be cognizant of how to lock down SMTP traffic such that people cannot relay traffic off your server.For those who do not know what a relay is... Joe.Bloe@spam######.com needs to send out 450,000 emails for some great new porn site that is going to be shut down anyhow. He'll be well out of compliance with his ISP's AUP (acceptable use policy) if he tries to send it off their servers and they'll likely only get out about 5000 of them before he gets nabbed. Instead, spammers will get a list of open relays. Joe sets his software to use the smtp server at some unsuspecting admin's system. Often, it'll take days or weeks before said admin realizes that he's been blasting that mail out in such quantity.The points I'm making here (and hopefully, I've not gone too far off), are:1> If you are able to use your own SMTP server, consider realtime blackhole lists.2> If you're going to use your own SMTP server, be sure that NOBODY can send mail off it except for your local network. You'll wind up with a huge mess to clean up if you don't secure that relay!!Trust me on these... I wish I'd known about this stuff without having to find out "the hard way."Bill

[Guest Edam]

>Often, it'll take days >or weeks before said admin realizes that he's been blasting >that mail out in such quantity. And said Admin may find that HIS server has been blacklisted since the spam appears to be coming from him.

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

Bill,Thanks for that interesting and informative message. Reading it has convinced me, if convincing where needed, that for an innocent such as myself, I getting good value for money by paying

[Guest]

>And said Admin may find that HIS server has been blacklisted >since the spam appears to be coming from him. I was remiss in not pointing that out, yes...Failure to secure your relay, if you're running an SMTP server, will not only cost you money (bandwidth) and the aggravation of having to secure a server that the world may have discovered is an open relay, it'll also give you the aggravation of "Now I have to figure out who's blacklisted me." Cleaning up the mess can take a great deal of time and stress... Not to mention the spammers seem to figure out that a relay is open really fast. They don't get the idea that you're closed nearly as quickly. It takes a while before the hammering on your door stops.

[Guest Edam]

Heh...I had to learn the hard way also, Bill.

[Guest Paul_W]

In the Personal Technology column of the Wall Street Journal of July 11, 2002, Walt Mossberg described what he thinks is the best defense against spam to date: a program called ChoiceMail.I don't use the program because it doesn't yet work with AOL, but I just pulled the newspaper out of my stack and I'll list the basics here for anyone who's interested.It's published by Digi-Portal Software of Parsippany, New Jersey, and the introductory price was (is?) $29.95. Here's the link that was given:http://www.digiportal.com/The program doesn't filter e-mail, but requires the spammer to get your permission to deliver messages to you by filling out a form on the Web. In theory you'd then receive a permission request from the spammer; in practice you won't. You can enter known senders in the program's approved list so they automatically get through, and you can explicitly block other senders.Apparently the program only works with standard Internet providers of e-mail such as Earthlink and AT&T; it doesn't work with corporate e-mail or Web-based systems like Yahoo or Hotmail.I'm beginning to sound like a salesman...but anyway that's the gist of it, and it sounds well worth looking into depending on your particular set-up.