I know one should be careful with an email address, but it’s too late for that now. Mine is on the web. Each day I get about 5 emails and 70 spams. The Yahoo filters work well, but I still have to scan through the spam.
I don’t want to change it. I’ve had the address for years and I dont have the address of everyone who might have mine. I don’t want to make it impossible for old friends to email me. Forwarding or checking the old account would defeat the purpose of it all.
Is there anything that can be done about spam that a person is already receiving? Other than praying they crucify the “spam king” I’ve heard they caught.
About seven years ago I signed up for DSL service. The account required a primary name which had to be less than eight characters long. This name became the primary email address for the account and cannot be changed. I also received four additional email addresses.
To prevent spam on the unchangeable primary address, I never used the account to send email. I have never entered the address onto any form nor even given it to anyone. I check this account only about once a week to see if my ISP is sending me anything urgent. When I do check it, I disable loading of graphics from the internet to prevent calling home.
Within hours of creating the account, spam started arriving. The amount has changed over the years, but it has never been below 30 messages a day. (The record day was around 100 messages.) Only “real” messages are from the ISP maybe four times a year.
I would love to cancel this email address and start over. My ISP says the only way to do this is to cancel the DSL service.
One thing that some have tryed, which does involve changing your email, is to set your current account to auto reply something like:
Hi, you are trying to contact me, Due to spam this email account is now closed, if you are a real person who cares about your fellow man you can email me at newemailaddress at myisp dot com
An auto-reply merely confirms to the spammer that the account is active. It means not only will the spam not stop, but the spammer can sell your address to others. When you consider that spamming is an automatic process, your efforts that a human will read your auto reply and act upon it are effectively nil.
There are services you can subscribe to that pre-filter your email (like www.spamcop.net) and there are also email services you can subscribe to that send a sort of auto-reply to people that send you email, and the sender needs to be validated by clicking a link or sending another email (then they’re put on your “whitelist” - which you can also pre-fill).
I can’t think of the names of these services off the top of my head, or what they’re called, but I know some Dopers use them. One of my service providers at work uses it too.
It can be a pain for the sender but it’s one way of fighting spam.
Actually because spam is a automated process is why it does work. Yes the spamers might get your autoreply (not all spam emails have can be sent back to), and might know that your email address is active, and send you more, but it doesn’t matter because you are not checking that email account anymore - ever, so they can send you as much as they want - you will never see it. The only one who will get your correct email is a person who reads your reply.
If I have to sign up for anything that I suspect will be a source of spam and not a place I care to receive any E-Mails from whatsoever, I create a temporary, fake E-Mail address through Spam Gourmet that forwards X number of E-Mails to me (configurable by user) and thereafter disappears as a valid E-Mail address. This allows me to sign up, grab the confirmation E-Mail to valid the signup, and then cease worrying about it entirely.
For existing spam (specifically for POP3 mail) I use an E-Mail proxy tailored to catch and filter spam, such as SpamPal, which uses the databases maintained by numerous anti-spam watchdogs (a collection of which you can find information on on the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) Website.) It sits between your TCP/IP connection and your E-Mail client and alters incoming mail to include header information and subject tags to allow you to use your client’s built-in filters to appropriately deal with Spam. SpamPal also has a Bayesian Plugin that is capable of learning from good and spam E-Mails to make better assumptions about which words contained in the E-Mails are most closely associated with spam E-Mail. I’ve been running this for a couple of months now and I’ve trained it to catch a good 99.99% of all spam I receive. It has only missed a few lately, and those only because there were a lot of garbage characters that tended to throw the word weighting off in the Bayesian filter. These have been VERY rare, though. The only other problem is that it will sometimes catch legitemate non-spam E-Mails, but for me this is because I deal on E-Bay and a few online stores quite a bit, and E-Mails from these places can look very much like spam. It’s hard to train the filter to know the difference between these and real spam, but it can (and does) eventually learn.
The spammers whose crap mail that I am getting it from lately have resorted to embedding a GIF image of the text in the email, using no text in the body at all, thereby getting around any filters that look for text patterns that look like spam and not having to munge their messages (not that I ever read them anyway). I don’t see any way at all to filter these out. What’s next? Do ISPs now have to run OCR on attached image files to look for spam?
I get 100-200 spam messages a day, but never see them. I finally found a solution that, for me, is 99% effective at identifying spam and has never, in thousands of messages, had a false positive. Cloudmark Desktop (Outlook only; sorry). A collaborative solution to a difficult problem.
I did this regularly for about a year. I stopped, because I never once got any spam from the spamgourmet addresses. Clearly my problem was not from things I sign up for on the web sending me spam or selling my address. Of course, for anything that’s truly one-use, I used mailinator.
And I’ve found that Gmail’s spam filter is pretty awesome. I’ve been using it for over a year and I almost never get spam in my inbox. And I only once had a legitimate email get marked as spam.
I created a whitelist for my email recently. The message rule I used is “Where the From line does not contain <all the addresses from my address book>, move it to the Spam folder”. I check the spam folder regularly, but after a couple of weeks of tweaking it’s pretty accurate now.
I’m very annoyed that my address has been picked up by spammers - after years of being careful about protecting it, it appears that someone at my ISP has sold a list of customers to a spammer. Many of the messages are addressed only to other email addresses of the same ISP. I’m going to change my email address soon, and have already set up an autoreply that informs humans of my new address. Most of the autoreplies that go out to spam mails get bounced as spammers rarely use a real return address and never use their own return address.
That may not be the case. Many spammers attempt to find valid email addresses by brute force, sending spam to a computer-generated list of likely email addresses. If your email address is something predictable like jrh@foo.net, or billg@foo.net, you are vulnerable. The spammer doesn’t care if 99.9% of the email addresses don’t exist, they just record the ones that do exist for future spam attacks.
Wierdly, I never get spam at my home e-mail, which address I use all over the place to buy stuff, etc. I mean NEVER. I get a ton of spam at my work e-mail, which address is supposed to be protected by all kinds of filters and stuff that the IT people have installed. Huh. I wish someone could explain to me why my home e-mail is so safe, since I could then patent that and sell it and become rich and retire and never have to look at the crap viagra ads at work again.