Hey all…
As some of you may know, I own a domain name. I won’t go into detail which one. In the past, I’ve caught a goodly ammount of spam, and I’ve set up filters for the main ones.
Well, tonight, I got over 400 pieces of spam that got past the filter. All of them were addressed to httc, then a string of random letters, then @ (my domain name).
I tried to set up the outlook express message rules to toss anything that started with httc that went to my domain, but it didn’t seem to work- I did httc*@ (domain name). Didn’t work.
Is there a way to insert wildcards in the filter of Outlook Express? Or is there a better way to handle this problem short of having a ‘accept only the following’ list?
I had a problem exactly like yours; the solution, IMO, is not filtering, but getting rid of the catch-all mailbox. Set up a named mailbox (and if necessary, add a bunch of aliases).
I did this; setting up [myfirstname]@[mydomain] as the mailbox, plus aliases such as ebaystuff@[mydomain], paypalstuff@[mydomain], tickets@[mydomain], onlineshopping@[mydomain], etc.
Spam dropped to virtually zero immediately, plus I have the satisfaction of knowing that, on the slim chance anyone is reading responses, my mail server is refusing the messages as invalid.
The other thing that helps is to stop using OE and use Mozilla Thunderbird, which has built in adaptive spam filtering, so you don’t have to worry about how spam is filtered out; you just mark it as spam and forget about it.
I’ve figued out the wildcard problem, and now it’s all going directly into the delete box, except for one or two which sneak past. The reason I’m adding to this thread is now out of a curiosity: To wit, all of the email comes to httucwiwvbgh@ (domain name). I can’t, for the life of me, think why this might have even be considered as a ‘valid’ email address, and yet… over 100 pieces an hour to it, most of which I suspect to be viruses. I’ve checked google, and I can’t find any specific reference for httucwiwvbgh, so I’m wondering… Does anyone out there have any idea where the heck this might be coming from?