Instead of spam filters, I’d rather have a password requirement for incoming E-Mail. The password will be changed periodically so that only 1 password will ever be the correct one.
I’m planning on having a webpage with a non-machine readable password graphic, which I will change when the spam starts building up again.
Is there any software to do this or is there any E-Mail ‘client’ with this capability? I currently use Mozilla Thunderbird. Does this have the capability of requiring an incoming E-Mail password?
I am not familiar with Thunderbird, but in Outlook you can set rules, and you could set a rule to move all email into a staging folder, and any email that contains your magic word in the subject line back to your default inbox. You can further configure it to just delete the mail in the staging folder periodically. Thunderbird may have some similar capabilities. Scott Adams requires the word “Dilbert” to appear in the subject line of his email but I don’t know what mechanism he uses to filter it.
More specifically, on my version of Thunderbird, select Tools -> Message Filters … then hit New. In that window you can define a filter that says ‘Subject : does not contain : password’ then ‘Delete Message’ (or move it to junk or whatever).
Then you can just edit that filter every time you change the password.
I take it you’re planning to say to people ‘please visit this page’ to check my e-mail password before sending any mail? Interesting theory, but I doubt you’ll need to change the password if you choose something obscure to start with.
I’d be interested to see if people bother to follow the instructions, or even read them. In my experience many people are very bad at following instructions and it depends on who loses out more if the mail doesn’t get from A to B.
A better way would be to add a filter for each of your regular correspondents that allows them to keep sending you mail without that rigmarole. Only put people through the password stuff once.
Right, “whitelisting” is a better way to go - only allow email from your trusted contacts. Then it’s you taking a single action (by adding a new person to your list) as opposed to them taking multiple actions (by looking up a password just to write you an email). Or maybe you’re trying to reduce legitimate emails as well… :dubious:
Otherwise, setting a mail rule/filter to the effect of “If subject line does not contain ‘thepassword’, route directly to Junk Mail folder” would accomplish your task.
Whitelisting is a better way to go, but does only work if you get mail from regular(ish) sources. I got the impression, no idea why, that the OP gets mail from all over the place and certainly instructions to put something or other in the subject line aren’t uncommon (although the web page graphic is a bit over the top).
Thinking about it more I wonder how much spam you get? I get a lot but it’s handled by filters quite well (SpamBayes on Outlook at home and GMails built in one elsewhere). I can tolerate one or two pieces slipping through, and false positives are rare (mostly spam like stuff I actually requested). I’m wondering if better filters might be the best solution.
The only issue I have with the home account is that it needs to download all the messages for the filters to run, this means waiting a while as it filters down the hundreds of mails to just one. If that the problem the OP is trying to fix (i.e. checking the subject to see if it’s worth downloading the rest of the message) then the suggestions here aren’t going to help.
I recently came across something when I sent an e-mail out to several people.
One came back, asking me to confirm that I had sent the e-mail. It was like my e-mail went into a holding pattern and I had to confirm that I wasn’t a spammer before it would be sent on its merry way.
I would assume, since so many spammers use fake addresses, anything that didn’t get a confirmation would be discarded. I’m not sure what you could Google to find out the software they were using.
Just stay with the same password and set up a filter to auto-reply to anyone who doesn’t have it in their subject line. Use a whitelist on all the emails in your address book so they don’t have to do this. Spammers spam millions of computers at a time. They don’t have time to give you the personalised attention to pass even a trivial test.
And yet the free e-mail service Bluebottle takes exactly this approach, unless they have some very sophisticated tests to determine whether the mail headers were forged. If their auto-replies generate as many unwanted emails as you seem to suggest, I’m surprised someone hasn’t added their domain to a server blacklist already.
Disclaimer: I don’t have an account with Bluebottle, so for all I know their server might be blacklisted for generating unwanted email auto-replies. From the looks of their testimonial page, though, they appear to offer a legitimate and well-received service.
I am getting about 200 spam E-Mails per day.
Let’s face it, asking someone to input a password into a subject line is not rocket science.
And for those who think I am going to use an elaborate sophisticated password graphic it will be generated by Microsoft Paint and look something like this graphic
The page on which the graphic resides will have instructions explaining what people will have to do and why they have to do this.
As someone mentioned, I get E-Mails from total strangers so whitelisting would not solve ALL my E-Mail problems. I think I’ll try the solution that Spacedog suggested.
I really don’t think this is too much to require for someone to send an E-Mail to me.
(I purposely made the E-Mail graphic very crude in order to foil spam bots that can read graphics).
I appreciate all the replies I’ve received so far.
Spambots will be able to read that with no problem at all. The technology is quite advanced; it’s reaching the point where things that can’t be read by spambots are also very difficult for humans to read. You might as well just put “please put ‘password’ in the subject of your email” in text on the page. I doubt any spambot is paying that much attention anyway; they’re just crawling the web and looking for things that look like email addresses.
That is quite true. Those graphics of dark gray letters on a medium gray background with about a zillion lines running through them (to discourage spambots) have been very difficult to read on some websites now.
I suppose you could try picture-based passwords. Like have a picutre of a hamburger or a zebra, and tell people to type what’s in the picture in the subject line.
I’m extremely curious how you guys get so much spam. I have multiple yahoo, gmail, and hotmail accounts I use for different purposes and the only unwanted mail I get is when I forget to tell sites I become a member of that I don’t want a newsletter or whatever, which is quickly remedied.
