I’ve been pretty happy using www.cloudmark.com 's Outlook plug-in, but it’s not going to free forever. I really don’t want to have to spend money to filter spam; when that happens “the spammers have won”.
Any suggestions? I was hoping there was a free, open source type product that works the way Cloudmark does, where users mark spam for the whole Cloudmark community. I found a UNIX thing, but I’m pretty married to Outlook on XP right now.
Does Outlook let you set up filters based on the content? My filter catches anything with these words/phrases in the body:
penis
this is not spam
mortgage
septic tank
%
penile
ink
Granted, it catches some of my legit mail and doesn’t catch all the spam, but it cuts about 12 out of my usual 15 spams out. I just check my Possible Spam folder for anything from legit senders and delete the rest.
Yes, that’s my last resort, to set up some home-rolled filters. Outlook actually makes it pretty easy to make them. I’d prefer a Cloudmark-like solution though, whereby when one person marks something as spam then everybody else using the product gets it automatically filtered.
I use Eudora and I catch about 995 pieces of spam out of 1000 sent my way. Yes, these are “home-rolled filters”, and it’s an ongoing operation to keep adding new ones, but it’s probably the most effective system in the long run.
I have 771 rules, divided up into categories and with labels applied to the spam messages to indicate which category of spam-rules the message was caught by. (I can also select a trashed message and with the Shift key down go to the filters and see which specific filter snagged the message).
I have Eudora set to actually empty the trash only when I exit the program or manually select “Empty Trash”, and the Trash folder is sorted by spam-category. I usually take quick glance at the subject titles and senders to check for any legitimate mail accidentally snagged.
Replace Cloudmark* with Spammunition. It works just as well.
Some things to filter on:
$
!
free (in either subject or sender)
opt
*Have you noticed their plans? Those who have been a part of the system, creating the list of spammers they will be using, are given a whole $1 off a month off the price of the service. Cheapskates.
I use SpamPal (www.spampal.org) - it works primarily by the publicly available dodgy sending domain lists, but it has ciustomisable white and black lists.
It also has a Bayesian analysis plugin that can learn what spam messages look like by statistically analysing the words and their distribution etc.
It marks suspect messages by inserting a word of your choise (SPAM by default) into the subject line; you can then deal with it using the message rules in your email client.
For the first month, I set my rules up to merely divert anything containing SPAM to a dedicated folder; this gave me a chance to put a few trusted people on the white lists and to train up the Bayesian filter a bit.
After that, I set it up to delete SPAM messages and reply with a standard message saying that the mail delivery failed; there is also an instruction (to insert one specific code word from a list) in my reply that anyone blocked in error can read and follow to get their message past the filter; spammers don’t read their replies, so they won’t get to see the instructions (and a bot simply would not be able to parse the instruction if it tried).
I have started an onslaught on SPAM using the ability to set your own filters in Outlook. After one week, I’m now catching 70 - 75% of SPAM. I can’t use the Outlook Adult and Junk filters as they filter out genuine e-mail too often. I work in retail software, so our legit. e-mails often have sales-type of words and phrases that trigger standard junk filters.
You have to look out for the anti-spam tactics they use - one I’ve noticed is to us a zero instead of the letter O, for example p0rn. Another is to put spaces between every letter. I now have a filter to catch “v i a g r a”. And they may use underscores: p_o_r_n.
An awful lot of spam has strings of junk letters at the end of subjects or the e-mail itself. Like idgyee dkfjrjksyh fsddfgh. Presumably this is to try defeat some anti-spam measure, but I don’t know what.
Look out for the fact that Outlook scans for matches within words, not just whole words (maybe there is a way to specify this, but I don’t know it). I discovered this when I added a filter for “cum” and it deleted all my e-mails containing “document”. Actually, I don’t delete the spam - I divert it to a spam folder so I can see the effect of my filters.
The trickiest are those with an innocuous subject, then include nothing but an html picture. This gives no words to filter on.
RealityChuck: Thanks, I’ll check that out. And, I did notice that Cloudmark is only taking a buck off. It didn’t really matter to me either way, since I knew I wasn’t going pay for it anyway. But it did strike me as cheap, as well.
Mangetout: Thanks also. I’m a little wary of the programs that access my mail on the server, though. But, the Bayesian filter sounds interesting; I might check it out just for that.
SpamPal works as a proxy between your mail client and server… for the record, it did go through a rather shaky patch (well, the beta did) where it would prevent the client from dopwnloading a message, but still allow it to be cleaned up off the server.
It got better though and I’ve now been using it for a month with no problems (80+ legit email a day and 100+ spam - last time I turned off the filter to look)
You may want to see if your ISP offers anything. A lot of em (AOL and MSN come to mind right off) have started promoting all kinds of spam control stuff.
I use MSN and don’t get ANY spam. Ever. It’s truly miraculous. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s the best.
My ISP is Adelphia Cable, and I guess they don’t have spam controls (at least I couldn’t find any on their web pages). I could have sworn they said they were going to add some with a recent mail upgrade, but I can’t find any. But, they at least finally implemented web-based email access and increased the size limits of the individual emails and the mailbox as a whole.
Funny, there’s finally something AOL and MSN has over my local provider. I guess I could rub their faces in the fact that lowly AOL has spam controls and they don’t…
I thought that you could continue to use the cloudmark beta software for free, and only had to pay if you upgrade to version 1?
That’s possible racekarl, I’ll have to look into it. Thanks!
Hey RealityChuck, Spammunition does work well. Thanks!
I’m not crazy about the fact that you can’t delete the spam, though. Maybe a future release will keep the results of its analyzation, so you can delete it.
At home I use Mail for Mac OSX which does Bayesian filtering…probably 90% or so effective.
At work, I have to run OS9, and so use Outlook Express. In addition to the built in Junk Mail filter set to “high”, I’ve followed the suggestions mentioned here for filtering on the headers. I don’t get any legitimate mail routed from Asia or Latin America (or several other countries) and so have filtered on the IPs from those area. I use SpamCop to do the grunt work in figuring out where the mail originated from, and act accordingly. It’s taken a bit of time to set up, but it works well and much better solution than filtering on content (for this particular email clinet)