new spam tactic bypasses filter; what to do?

Factual Questions
1

I am now getting a ton of spam from a source that uses an apparently inexhaustible supply of disposable email addresses, so my spam bin just fills up forever and there’s always more. What to do?

2

Empty your spam bin?

Seriously, if they are all going into your spam bin, then you are catching them all. Just delete them.

3

Yeah, it sounds like your spam filter is working perfectly.

4

Are they from a dynamic domain provider like dyndns?

I was getting some from one of their “clients” a little bit ago. Nothing I did would block them. I guess dyndns figured out that someone was doing something wrong and dropped them.

5

No, I mean I’m manually flagging them as spam, but since each new message comes from a unique email address, the spam bin doesn’t filter anything.

6

Try SpamAssassin or a similar filter which can “learn” to distinguish spam.

7

My Hotmail filter sends any ‘nonsense’ email address to the bin.

8

The smarter email providers spend a lot of effort on smart filters - analyzing not just the address source, but the content. Usually the first few might get through, but then the program figures out which one simple trick the spammers are using and blocks stuff with that sort of message. (For example one trick was to put some or all of the email in a picture that looked like text - so that’s a major flag now… plus most emails also won’t download the pictures automatically, which also solves another problem - the pics may be in fact web references to pictures on a web server somewhere, and when you opened the email, that would cause the picture to be loaded from the spammer’s server, thus tipping them off that you had opened the email so it was a valid email address.)

If you get your email from a big provider, it will probably take them a few days to figure out the new scam and filter it, but sooner or later they will do so.

9

I just contacted my email provider and they reiterated md2000’s advice: keep flagging the spam to the junk folder, and (eventually) the heuristics will figure out what the spam messages have in common and block them. Here’s hoping…

10

I have my own domains/email servers, but I use GMail as my mail client. There are a lot of things I’m not crazy about with GMail, but its spam flagging is pretty good.