I double check my spam filters ...
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Technically speaking.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Because of gmail's retarded way of handling '.' in the username (i.e it really doesn't) I get 60+ spams / day because of idiots who can't type their address properly and end up 'colliding' with mine.
I've gotten medical details from family members trying to send to other family members, one business lady in europe who was pretty upset she wasn't getting shipments because she sent mail to me instead of the proper person (i just watched the world burn from my side -- she just kept asking for status updates and other requests), and countless other redbox rental records from other idiots...
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:3, Insightful)
> Why would I...
There's so much wrong with that I don't know where to start.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not the AC you replied to, but I have tried being friendly and letting people know that they sent to the wrong address.
No good deed goes unpunished. The responses tend to be abusive, threatening or both, blaming the recipient for both obtaining the mail, reading some of it, and the capital offense of implying that the sender might have made a mistake.
If they're stupid enough to send e-mail to the wrong address, the risk is that they're also stupid enough to think that you were the one who caused the problem.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Yeah I have gotten some pretty abusive responses too for attempting to point out someone elses mistake. I suspect they think I have somehow hijacked the email address they wanted to send to, rather than that they have made any mistake themselves.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
I happen to have an mail-alias using my middle name, a name that around here could also be a family name and many mail clients will automagically complete a simple name in the Send to: bar with their domain name, that way every year I have received a couple of rather private or confidential messages (lawyer and investor stuff) obviously mend for another.
Every time I've made a short reply suggesting they double check the address they send to because I am not the person intended.
And every time it was appreciated by the fat-fingered sender.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
I had that happen at work, where they use the firstname.lastname@company.com format. There was a guy on the other side of the world with the same name as me, so every now and then I'll get technical questions for him about stuff I know nothing about. I forward it on to him with a bit of banter "I can't help her with her problem, can you go talk to her for me?" He seems pretty cool.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Why would I..
Because it would take literally less than a minute and any decent human being would do so. Most indecent human beings would also do so simply because they do not want to be spammed with multiple emails per day about some other person's private business.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Why would I...
Common decency...?
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
This. Sometimes their filters are too enthusiastic and mark legit messages as SPAM. I check the SPAM folder every couple weeks, but then again, not the filters themselves.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Yeah, I hate it when they do that and especially if you can't turn it off. I only get a few spam mails a day, so spam really isn't a problem for me, but nevertheless:
- gmail has a spam filter you can't turn off (so I stopped using it)
- iCloud now also has a spam filter you can't turn off, and even worse, some of the "spam" is even deleted immediately without sending it to the spam folder! So e-mails are getting lost, I have no way of even knowing this happened, and neither does the sender.
Please, please, please, I don't want legit mail to get lost, so stop imposing these filters on me! I prefer to receive the odd spam message rather than lose real mail.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:3)
Post your email address here - I can help.
I won't be able to find a webservice that lets you adjust the spam filter, but it might make you appreciate the one on Gmail!
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:1)
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Re:Once in a while when... (Score:1)
Once in a while when I see the count on the Spam folder in the hundreds, i'll check the first page or two of filtered emails to see what is getting flagged. Sometimes I find emails from companies I do business with getting flagged since those companies also send advertisements thinly veiled as newsletters. The big annoyance for me are companies that send emails from different domains than their official company domain. It makes it really hard to tell if it is legit email or a phishing scam.
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:2)
Re:Technically speaking.... (Score:1)
I use Thunderbird (Score:2)
And it's pretty good at handling spam.
Add to it a strict filter on my mail server that bounces known spam sources.
Re:I use Thunderbird (Score:2)
And it's pretty good at handling spam.
Add to it a strict filter on my mail server that bounces known spam sources.
Mmmmm Thunderbird [livejournal.com] and spam [berkeley.edu]. A vagrant's delight.
Missing option... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing option... (Score:2)
$ grep upstart.com
So few spam (Score:2)
I get so little spam anyway (which really surprises me, there must be filters out there that I don't know about).
I have two very old Yahoo email address that I just check sometimes. These get the most spam, about three or four messages a month each. I suspect that Yahoo must be filtering and deleting before I even see the email. Suspected spam then turns up on my computer and gets filtered by my local spam filter. It works 90% of the time.
My main personal address just doesn't get spam. I suspect that is because I have never put it online in plain text form.
I also have a domain with a wild card for email. I sometimes get spam at that domain, but rarely.
I also use Mailinator for anything even slightly sketchy, so I guess lots of spam meant for me is going there.
I check my spam folder every time I get emails in it, but this happens roughly once a week or less.
I know, intellectually, that spam is a huge problem, but I just don't seem to personally have a problem.
Re:So few spam (Score:2)
My spam is all 419 scams (Score:3)
Although I've noticed lately that the Nigerian scams are being replaced by Hong Kong scams.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:1)
For a while, I've been forwarding the contents of one spam email to the the return address of other spam emailers (with the original spammer's email address included of course). Easy, fun and slows them down that much more.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:3)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:1)
Oh, give me some credit. The only email addresses they get are the other spammers and mine. Anywho, you'd be surprise at how rapidly this cuts down responses and they start auto-responding to each other and realize what's happening. Give it a whirl. Or you could try something a bit more creative by asking the spammers to do some that "creates trust" like these guys...http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YM5QMKLjjm8
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:3)
No. (Score:1)
Spammers hijack other people's addresses and spoof them. Scammers do not. Scammers want replies, so they'll either send mail from a legit address or include a legit address somewhere in the email.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
So, you're spamming people who have innocently had their email addresses used by spammers (many spam From: addresses bear no relation to the actual sender). You are contributing to the problem.
Sure, address spoofing is common. But if you get spam from the spoofed address of someone you know, you have to wonder if their address book was compromised as well.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:4, Informative)
If you took the time to read all your 419 spam, you'd know this.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:3)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
My original point stands - by forwarding any spam, the OP is contributing to the problem. His statement, not specific to 419 scams, was
Doing so is very likely to either send spam to, or make it appear that spam is being sent from, an innocent party.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:1)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Body email matches reply-to: 11
Body email different form reply-to: 4
No body email address: 2
You were saying?
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Someone please mod parent up as informative. Only a truly incompetent spammer would allow a genuine (i.e., belonging to the spammer) reply-to or from address to find its way into the headers. Anyone who forwards to a spammer any address taken from a spam message header is truly adding to the problem.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
Usually via a link to a web site.
Re:My spam is all 419 scams (Score:2)
SpamAssassin (Score:2)
I run my own mail server and I try to keep SpamAssassin relatively up-to-date.
Did have a period when I didn't update it for six months or so though and didn't really detect any more spam than usual slipping through (and no legitimate mail being marked as spam either).
Re:SpamAssassin (Score:2)
Same here. I use the fact that SpamAssassin gives more than a pass/fail score to filter spam into two folders: the 'I'm absolutely sure this is spam' folder, and the 'I've set the sensitivity fairly high, so this might be real email' folder. I scan the second one every day, just to check up on things. Usually months go by without it catching anything wrong, but occasionally bulk email I've requested - from a mailing list or similar (or my dad's emails, I'm not sure why) end up in there. I take it out and train SpamAssassin on it, and it'll be a while before I have trouble again.
Every few weeks (Score:2)
It is unfortunate, but some of my family members emails end up caught by spam filters, probably because they aren't careful with their pc's and have been used as SPAM bots.
Stupid filters (Score:3, Funny)
Personal vs Corporate Responsibility (Score:2)
My personal spam filtering is through gmail's filtering, and pretty much the only time I check the spam folder is when I don't get an email I'm expecting. The last couple of times I've checked, I have seen some legitimate email in there, but it's all automated daily emails from companies I have accounts with and the like - it's still never actually caught anything important to me.
In my former job, however, one of my responsibilities was running the spam filtering system where I worked. It was a state agency with around four thousand people, so we had a mailbox for people to forward spam they received to, and our users were supposed to report blocked email that shouldn't have been blocked to the help desk. False positives that were reported via the help desk, I checked out as soon as I got the ticket, forwarding the email on and then examining why it was blocked and tuning the filters if necessary.
The false negative reports I usually checked once or twice a day during the work week, but sometimes less often if other, higher priority tasks were pressing. At the height of things, a few years ago, our incoming email volume was around 2 million messages a day, more than 99% of which the system classified as spam and blocked. Even with that, we received dozens to low hundreds of reports of spam that made it through a day. A lot of those were duplicates (same message received by multiple people), and some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe), but still, there were a dozen or two individual new things to block every day. False positives from our system were much rarer, at least going by reports - I'd say we averaged about two or three a month.
Re:Personal vs Corporate Responsibility (Score:2)
. . . some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe)
In general the unsubscribe process for most mail lists that one has voluntarily signed up for has improved. Usually, there's a link in the email to an unsubscribe page that requires no more than one or two clicks and you're done -- no more mail within a few hours to a couple days. Some want you to rekey your email address -- that's a little more of a hassle but not that bad unless I'm reading mail on a mobile device and have to come back later.
However, some unsubscribes are sufficiently inconvenient that it's easier to spam-block them. E.g., they want me to log in with a password that I may have never permanently recorded when I signed up because I never anticipated needing to "log in" to a read-only mail list. They may want some other identity confirming information that is out of date and I can no longer remember. Still others require that I subscribe to a mail list I that don't care about to receive some offline benefit -- every 10th burger free is nice, but I don't really need online notification that you've found a new way to apply bacon to a sandwich.
In all cases, I'd prefer to unsubscribe the "right" way, but when it's difficult or impossible I gotta get out the spam hammer.
Re:Personal vs Corporate Responsibility (Score:3)
. . . some were user false positives (sorry, the mailing list you signed up for isn't spam - if you don't want to get mail from it any more, unsubscribe)
In general the unsubscribe process for most mail lists that one has voluntarily signed up for has improved. Usually, there's a link in the email to an unsubscribe page that requires no more than one or two clicks and you're done -- no more mail within a few hours to a couple days. Some want you to rekey your email address -- that's a little more of a hassle but not that bad unless I'm reading mail on a mobile device and have to come back later.
Maybe I should have expanded on that, but my post was getting a bit lengthy already.... When something looked like it could be a legitimate mailing list, I usually checked to see if there was an unsubscribe link or email, and, if so, how it worked. Part of this was niceness on my part; another part was protecting our users - because with 4000 of them, there were definitely some out there who were not smart enough to figure out things like "this supposed unsubscribe link actually goes to a different site, so maybe I shouldn't click on it".
So I usually clicked it for them, if it was a link. If that unsubscribed them, well and good. If it went to some sort of page requesting the reason you were unsubscribing or the like, well, it depended on how busy I was that day. Sometimes I'd do it for them, sometimes I'd send them my canned "you can unsubscribe yourself from this mailing list" email (which also had in it, "if you unsubscribe, but keep getting email from them, let me know and I'll block them"). If it said something like "a confirmation email will be sent to make sure it's really you unsubscribing", I'd send them the canned email. If it did something stupid/evil like "you must enter the password you gave when you signed up for this to unsubscribe!", I'd often just block the place, because who the hell wants to be on a mailing list that doesn't want to let you leave it?
The more common case where I'd have to ask them to do it, though, was where it was a mailing list system that wanted you to send an email with "unsubscribe" in it, or to send an email to a listname-unsubscribe@wherever sort of address. I could send email as any user I wanted to... but that involved logging out of the account I usually used and logging into a separate admin account. It was generally faster for me to send them the canned "you can unsubscribe yourself from that" email, unless it was one of the regular problem children who I knew wouldn't be able to handle that without major hand-holding.
My favorites, though, were the people who would report internal admin emails as spam. Pretty much any time the Secretary's Office sent out an email to all employees, I'd get it reported as spam by a few people, but I could somewhat understand that. People reporting their direct boss' emails as spam was a bit odder. And there were a few times that I got my "you can unsubscribe yourself from that" email reported as spam, or even my "the sender you reported has been blocked" or the "we cannot block this sender for you, and here's why" one reported. (On that last one - the main one I had to use that for was people who wanted email from the Governor's Office blocked. As much as I hated the weekly "this is what I've been doing this week" email one of our governors decided to send out to all state employees, I would've been in a crapload of trouble if I'd blocked it.)
I did, however, have a few times that I got legitimate requests from members of the public reported as spam - that happened something like three or four times over the several years I was running the spam filter there - less than once a year, I'd say. Since I didn't know for sure if the users had simply made a mistake or not, and didn't want to get anyone fired over a mistake, I took those emails, stripped them of anything that would identify which employee had sent
unsubscribe (Score:1)
unsubscribe
barracuda.... (Score:2)
I look at the current barracuda log and constantly tweak.
And I trawl it for phishing sites to get my Free Netcraft Mug for phishing reports!!!!
Only when I suspect something is missing. (Score:2)
Like I never got the e-mails or something that I was supposed to get. It happens rarely though!
No real need to check them. (Score:5, Insightful)
Been working well for a decade. The neat thing is that 90% of the stuff that needs to be rejected can be done without any spam analysis at all. I only call my spamassassin checks *AFTER* vetting things through MimeDefang. Why waste the CPU cycles? RBLs, Pretending to be from my domain, mail to system accounts, invalid HELO (not FQDN or IP address - single words are very popular with spammers/botnets), RFC1918 HELO addresses, etc. After that, they then go through my spamassassin process, which has been collecting bayes data for several years. The community provided spamassassin rules are kept up to date, and I have a Nagios process that also ensures they are up to date (check_sa-update on nagios exchange. Written by yours truly).
I'd put my system, based on MimeDefang, Spamassassin, clam, etc against barracuda any day. I bet I have a lot less false positives (0 the past year, 1 every couple of months while tuning at my last company), and use a whole lot less CPU by discarding obvious garbage that doesn't need to be processed by spamassassin.
The most recent thing is the "Hello" stuff from legitimate mail accounts. The spammers are using active exploits the past few years to slip through filters, but they still don't get in. I should relabel my spam folder to "Friends with compromised accounts" Everything else scores off the charts and is discarded.
hallelujah (Score:2)
Lightweight pre-message-receipt checks are the bomb. For November (percentages are of total blocked):
HELO checks ... 16.1%: underscores ... 0.0% (RFC 2821), "bare" address literals ... 10.6% (RFCs 810, 952, 1035), spoofing local domain ... 0.6%, non-FQDN ... 4.7% (RFC 2821)
Relay disallowed ... 11.8%
RBLS ... 41.4%: Spamhaus XBL ... 39.1%, SpamCop SCBL ... (only after Spamhaus) 2.4%
Unknown recipient ... 2.1%
Greylisting ... 30.9%
That's almost a third cut out with extremely lightweight checks (that is, excluding the greylisting and RBLs). And nearly two-thirds cut out with a couple RBLs and greylisting. All together these resource-inexpensive checks total ... well ... over 100% if you add up the rounded values. ;)
My actual spam rate for this month, after all these lightweight protections is 9 spam v. 1636 ham, or a failure rate of 0.55%. (All this for about 160 email addresses spread across 12 domains, some having been around for about 16 years.) At 0.55%, do I care to implement post-receipt, heavy-processing? Nope.
But not everyone will put up with greylisting's initial-contact lag (or with having to whitelist or set up scoring of emails via things like SPF to bypass greylisting), so I can imagine post-receipt filtering being useful for them.
But now that I think about it, SPF checking to bypass greylisting would totally rock.
Anyway, thank you very much Spamhaus (and the CBL source for XBL), and SpamCop.
Re:hallelujah (Score:2)
Oh, those numbers were for all the messages that went through the server nicely. About 40% of all connections were "aborted" (disconnected) rather than hit these anti-spam measures. (Rejected unauthorized SMTP pipelining, another extremely cheap check, was responsible for most of these aborts.)
Re:hallelujah (Score:2)
I always forget to mention NJABL, another list contributing to the XBL. Thanks to them, too.
Re:No real need to check them. (Score:2)
The first 90% is handled for me by greylisting. Even less work for the receiving system than your solution.
Custom spam control (Score:2)
I never liked the idea of the Bayesian spam filtering that is most popular with big e-mail providers. I figure, as a software engineer, I have e-mail conversations about spam that might be caught by the filters. And in the meantime, the spammers are including paragraphs of text out of The Hobbit in their messages. Yeah, I know the spam filtering tech has gotten a lot more accurate over the years. But...
Years ago, I decided to do it myself. I set up my own e-mail server and built custom filters. I look for connections that violate SMTP protocols. I look for connections that don't have host names. I look for messages with forged headers or that violate SPF or that come from domains known to use Domain Keys, but don't have one.
I use white lists and black lists and thresholds for things that aren't automatically spam, but if there are enough of them, then it gets flagged.
Sure, I'm doing a lot more work than you are, but I successfully block thousands of spam messages each day, and only very rarely have one sneak through (and then I figure out how it got through, and update my system), and also fairly rarely I'll block a legitimate message (and most of the time that's because of a mail server configuration issue on their end).
Sometimes, it's good to be a geek.
No filters (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No filters (Score:3)
Send the links in the spam to Google Safe Search too, help protect Joe Sixpack from himself.
And send a copy to quick.@spam.spamcop.net, anonymous@submit.spam.acma.gov.au, and use the abusix plugin in thunderbird to submit it to blackhole.mx
Too Much Trust in Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I check the Gmail spam folder daily - usually there are less than a dozen messages there - and about once a month find something that shouldn't have been blocked.
I would never put 100% trust in a spam filter.
Re:Too Much Trust in Technology (Score:1)
If you're checking your spam messages daily, why even have a filter? Aren't you just adding more clicks and task-transition time that way?
Poorly Worded Poll: Spam Filters vs. Spam Folders (Score:2)
:>)
Yeah, I made the same mistake in reading the poll because it's a poorly worded poll question: Spam Filters vs. Spam Folders
It may also be breaking the validity of the poll results (as if the poll results have so much validity here anyway
.
My guess is that the frequency of checking spam folders is a function of four variables:
(1) volume of spam received daily,
(2) frequency of the emptying of the spam folder in the email-system,
(3) the false-positive rate of your spam filter checking, and
(4) the level of expectation which you have that of the number of important emails you are waiting on to arrive from boyfiend/girlfriend/boss/customer.
My guess is that the frequency with which you check spam filters is a function of:
(a) the false-positive rate ~ real emails being misfiled into your spam folder;
(b) the false-negative rate = spam slipping through into your regular folders;
(c) how new your spam-filter setup is;
(d) whether you're allowed to change your spam filters at all
(e) whether you train your spam-filters with examples when you catch a false-positive or a false-negative or whether you can provide a regular expression to apply as a filter.
If your false positives or false negatives suddenly go up, or if your spam-filters setup is newer, you'll check/change your spam-filters more frequently.
.
Considering that the distribution of frequencies for these two activities are different (checking spam folders is usually done more often than checking spam filters), and that you can't be certain how a respondent read or interpreted the poll (unless like the parent poster, they specifically mention the phrase "check the spam folder" and then you know that their answer refers to the frequency of checking the folder.)
oops, s/boyfriend/boyfiend/ above ;) (Score:2)
oops, i really meant s/boyfiend/boyfriend/ above (Score:2)
Never, I assume it's working (Score:2)
I have an email forwarding alias and an email service, both provide spam filtering, and I don't think I'm missing anything important. If a questionable message is caught by the alias provider, the sender gets a reply asking them to prove their humanity -- this is the provider's feature, not my idea, BTW.
My wife, on the other hand, still uses hotmail, and she gets a lot of false positives so she has to check her "spam folder" frequently. Maybe she's misconfigured something on her end. I don't know, and it's not my problem unless she asks me, which she hasn't.
What I do do myself is put a few simple email rules on my personal computer, not for real spam, just "virtual" spam. Anything marked "high priority" goes into a special folder labeled "deal with it later". Seriously, it's only high priority if it's a high priority for me, not the sender. Secondly, I take anything with a blank subject or a subject containing redundant information and put those in the "annoying" folder. This means emails with words in the subject line like, "subject," "message," "email," "note," "letter," "from," etc. My assumption here is that the sender probably also fills the email with a lot of useless junk, so I postpone dealing with it as long as possible.
Double Check? or Add To? (Score:2)
Missing option (Score:2)
I have spam filters, but they're set not to delete spam mail I receive; rather, they just tag it as spam in the subject line and let me choose whether or not to read the mail. So I guess I check the caught spam every time I check my email.
On the other hand, I don' t think I ever check for messages deleted by my Usenet killfile. Spam is one thing, but trolls are another.
Don't need any spam filters (Score:2)
Every sender gets a unique email address, and whenever spam might come through, all I need to do is disable that single address. Haven't needed to do this for months :: Haven't gotten any spam in months..
Option 1 I guess... (Score:1)
Whitelist, not spam filter (Score:2)
I put everything that isn't whitelisted by being from people in my address book in a folder labeled "spam".
If something shows up in there I usually notice it right away and either delete it or add the sender to my address book.
Some especially persistent senders get extra special treatment by being added to a "mark as read and delete" filter.
Google Voice (Score:2)
Slightly odd option (Score:2)
Daily summary (Score:2)
Our spam filter sends out a daily summary of the quarantine, which I skim for false positives (rare, but they do happen). Unfortunately, we're moving to google, and I do have to check it daily, as it frequently has false positives and it doesn't seem to learn...
Explain how "I don't use any" works? (Score:2)
The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.
So how do you do it? Do you simply not use email? Is your email address brand new? Do you only use burner accounts? Do you get a thrill from reading or deleting trolling spam? Do you simply not know you have a spam filter?
Spam control without filters (Score:2)
The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.
So how do you do it? Do you simply not use email? Is your email address brand new? Do you only use burner accounts? Do you get a thrill from reading or deleting trolling spam? Do you simply not know you have a spam filter?
The vast majority of the email I receive does not pass through a filter. The trick is to control who can find your email address. My personal email address is given only to friends and family. It gets essentially no spam and I have not change the address in 15 years.
Virtually everyone else gets a unique address assigned specifically to them. If I get spam on the address, I deactivate it. Sometimes I create a new address and notify but most of the time, I decide and any organization that leaks my address to spamers isn't worth talking to.
I have two addresses that have spam filters:
1) An address for Usenet. It is aggressively filtered. Collateral damage is acceptable since the odds of anything important being sent there are nil.
2) A short, easy to remember address that, unfortunately, appeared in three Usenet postings in 1995. Lightly filtered because it is too handy to get rid of and still gets some spam.
Another address is used on business cards I use for networking. It is unfiltered. Every few years, I need to create a new address, print new cards, and direct the old address to return a message telling senders to contact me via a web form. I don't think anyone has actually bothered. I don't think I've been really concerned either. After a few months, anyone who hasn't "graduated" to a personalized address or my friends and family address isn't someone I have much need to communicate with.
Re:Spam control without filters (Score:2)
I wish you luck keeping your personal email address spam free. All it takes is one of your trusted family or friends to get a virus and your email address is out there for the harvesting, no way to get it back.
Unfortunately my personal email address goes back to 1993, essentially before spam, and is in tons of archives (usenet especially) so that's that.
Sure, I could create a new personal email address, but there is a certain pride in having the same email address for nearly 20 years.
Re:Spam control without filters (Score:2)
I wish you luck keeping your personal email address spam free. All it takes is one of your trusted family or friends to get a virus and your email address is out there for the harvesting, no way to get it back.
Unfortunately my personal email address goes back to 1993, essentially before spam, and is in tons of archives (usenet especially) so that's that.
Sure, I could create a new personal email address, but there is a certain pride in having the same email address for nearly 20 years.
Actually, the virus scenario has already happened, multiple times. I get a few spams while the virus is active but, so far, none of the viruses have harvested my address into a persistent database. It has been 15 years. I shutdown my 1994 address in 1997, forwarding only originators who had sent me legitimate mail in the past year. I should probably shut down the forward. It has probably been a decade since any legitimate mail was sent there and the filter occasionally (bug) passes along spam.
Re:Spam control without filters (Score:2)
I have some mail addresses registered that have never been used and yet they receive spam.
The nice observation is that addresses (partially) made up from random strings are hardly ever spammed.
Spam Spam Spam Spam Wonderful Spam!!! (EOM) (Score:1)
Beautiful spam! ....
But I don't like spam...
"once a day" - WHAT??? (Score:3)
May as well not use any filters then.
Nothing really to check... (Score:2)
On my own domain, I have SpamAssassin configured well enough that I simply have it delete anything flagged as spam. Either it's in my inbox, or it's gone. I do tend to err on the safe side as far as what it tags though. In all the years I've been doing this, I've had one complaint from a family member about a possible missed confirmation message from an online signup. However, I submitted one myself, and the mail was received right away, so I think it was just a fluke that the email didn't get delivered, as opposed to my filter erroneously eating it. A few times I've actually increased the spam threshold, just to allow more borderline spams through so I could learn/report them.
I have a couple GMail accounts, one of which is based on my name and was created solely for testing external mail flow at work. However, there are no less than 5 other people who seem to think it's their address, and these people seem to be the type to enter their email address anywhere they can. I get tons of spam at this address, despite never actually using it publicly. I mainly got the other one just to reserve the name, rather than for actual usage. I get a few spams to it, but nothing major. GMail's filtering does a pretty good job, with only a few getting missed (and no false positives, since I don't actually use them for real email). I do check the caught spams and report them though, just because I'm an angsty geek.
Why would I filter my spam... ? (Score:2)
I am happy just to delete it all :-)
public relations (Score:1)
There is no spam. (Score:2)
Spam? (Score:2)
Please tell us of the mysterious thing you call 'spam'.
Where can one get this 'spam'?
Is there a place for FREE 'spam'?
I like Spam... (Score:2)
It's delicious, especially with either scrambled eggs for breakfast... or as one of the meats served in Chinese hot-pot.
Checks (Score:2)
I check when I don't get an expected email to see if one of my filters has stopped an email, I might have forgotten to whitelist a new address.
I look into /dev/null but can see nothing there, so all's well ;)
When I'm missing something. (Score:2)
Whenever I'm expecting an email, but haven't received it.
It depends on the definition (Score:2)
Filtering != Stopping (Score:2)
For those who are new to my saying this, I will repeat that spam is an economic problem and will only be solved with economic solutions. When the economic rewards of spam are no longer realized by the spammers, they will take on a different trade. Until they they will be incentivized to continue sending spam.
That said, my current employer has set up an institutional-level spam filter with the same rules applied to all boxes. This forces me to check my spam filter at least once a day as any false positive is unacceptable to me currently.
Missing Option! (Score:2)
Whenever I'm preparing my next spam campaign. I mean...duh! You've got to check all 500+ of them to make sure you're getting inbox delivery. *ducks*
spam (Score:2)
Thanks to Cisco Ironport - relatively never (Score:2)
We use the Cisco Ironport - and have done since before Cisco bought them. Quite good devices - but as posted by someone above - 90% of the work is done by reputation filtering and protocol correctness filtering - which can be done using the normal black holes with relatively no cost. If the spam makes it through both of these, then its probably got a 5% chance of making it through the content filtering. I probably get a couple of false negatives a day - and 0 false positives in the last 3 years..
All the time (Score:2)
I don't let email pass through my spam folder without eyeballing. Actual spam gets mark read, non-spam gets unjunked. Usually I get between 2000-3000 spam mails per month, 500-600 actual emails (including mailing lists and crud), perhaps 10 false negatives and 5 false positives. That's a pretty good ratio, but the five might be important so I still have to scan through the 3000. It's less work than it sounds like, particularly since it's enough to do it about every two weeks.
Re:All the time (Score:2)
(edit: which means only sorting through 1500 emails every two weeks, of course)
Spam filters don't like personal mail servers (Score:2)
These emails REGULARLY get marked as spam by gmail, no matter how many times I tell it that it's not spam. I think it might have more to do with the originating IP. I know that DNSBLs like spamhaus block certain IP ranges because it believes there shouldn't be any email servers in that range.
Re:Spam filters don't like personal mail servers (Score:2)
I have sendmail or some other MTA installed on my work computer (a Linux box) so that it can send me email notifications upon completion of scripts and batch jobs.
These emails REGULARLY get marked as spam by gmail, no matter how many times I tell it that it's not spam. I think it might have more to do with the originating IP. I know that DNSBLs like spamhaus block certain IP ranges because it believes there shouldn't be any email servers in that range.
Yes, this happens. The thing to do is verify and the problem.with of the multi rbl checkers [anti-abuse.org] and then follow procedure to get your address removed from the list. My personal server is in a static IP range but it still ends up on one of the dynamic IP block lists every now and then. Some of the lists are now blocking end user static IP's too, by default, so it isn't necessarily an error: just over-zealous policy.