I have two email accounts - one for friends and the other I use when making requests to businesses, etc.
The account for friends is fine - have never received a single spam.
The other email account is driving me crazy with these porn spams…and they are impossible to block as they keep changing. For example:
Joohhn Smithh: Lvvver Grls 4 UUU
and the next day it is
Johnnn Smythe: Lovvvr Gurrls F4 Ewe
Etc. etc. etc…
I can’t keep going in to block the names as the names seem to be computer generated so you never get the same one twice. I can’t even go in and block the subject titles as they are gibberish.
Yes, I can just delete them, but do you have any idea how much fun it is to delete 20-30 of these things every day?
The easiest solution is to get a better spam filter. The current rage in spam filtering is full-text Bayesian analysis, which is nicer than the manual filters both because it’s not restricted to name/subject filtering and because it doesn’t require manual keyword selection. You typically tell the program which messages are spam and which are not, and it uses that information to train its own filters; after a while it gets pretty good at recognizing the differences. (Of course, this depends on how different they are. Individually-typed e-mails are very different from the usual HTML-tag-filled/1eet-speak spam e-mails, but if you’re getting business form e-mail it may look more like the HTML spam.) Mozilla’s e-mail client (Thunderbird) has an internal Bayesian filter which works reasonably well IME.
Some e-mail servers can make single-use e-mail addresses (they work for one or a small number of replies and then start bouncing), which is probably more trouble than it’s worth for the amount of spam you’re currently getting.
There is only one sure solution. Buy a strong magnet. Open your computer box, and carefully remove your hard drive. Place the magnet to the top of the hard drive, and mount it there with 6p sheet metal screws. Wash your modified hard drive thoroughly in soapy water. Reinstall.
I too would recommend a Bayesian filter for spam. I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client, which has an excellent filter built in, and it’s free. It was the first e-mail client I liked well enough for me to leave Eudora, which I had used for the previous 8 years. It also automatically imported the 15,000 saved e-mails I have over those 8 years, and created new mailboxes within Thunderbird, so I didn’t lose anything. After a couple weeks, the spam filter hardly misses anything. It downloads and trashes the spam before I can even look at it. It’s great.
During the first month you just need to check the junk folder from time to time to weed out false positives. While they are rare, even in the beginning, they do occasionally happen. However, I haven’t had a single false positive since the first 5 weeks of using it.
Sounds good, and the price is right. I will try it when I get home. If I read the brief overview correctly, I can import emails from the other account(s) and it will filter them?
Sounds exactly like what I was hoping exisited.
However, if I ever find out the location of those servers that have been sending me this stuff for the past few years…give me a sledge hammer and stand back.