Well, I am almost at wits end and on the verge of abandoning my long-held email address. I am now getting upwards of 100 Spams a day. My Outlook Express has just under 300 filter “rules” (which I have tried to make as inclusive as possible) that catch about 90% of the crap but still I get at least 10 “new” ones per day. I started a discussion HERE about my earlier experiences (which produced no magic bullets), but lately I have noticed something more incidious:
It seems that many spammers have now taken to constructing the body of their messages as .gif images ONLY, that is, there is NO TEXT in the body with which you can construct a filter rule. Typically, the “From” name will be come random personal name, and the “Subject” will be something innocuous like “Sorry I missed you.” So there is nothing (as far as Outlook Express filter choices) from which you can construct a filter. The “alphabet soup” mentioned in the above link continues, but again, is not something that can be predicted filter-wise.
Am/are I/we completely doomed? Is there any possibility that , given that a large proportion of Spam no doubt originates “off shore”, a workable “do-not-Spam” list (similar to the national telemarketing do-not-call list) can be instituted?
Yes, we’re doomed. About 40% of all e-mail is now spam, and is estimated by some to approach 70% in a few years if the trend continues.
I personally recieve about 50-70 spams a day on my personal e-mail.
Your last point is one of several schemes proposed to combat spa,. It’s possible this wouldn’t work well, but it’s worth a shot – right now nothing is being done except at the ISP level, and that’s working miserably.
Pleae write your congress-person a very polite, but pissed-off letter on this issue. Solving this will require a national policy, perhaps a trans-national policy.
RedDawgEsq - it’s getting to the point where the only solution is a ‘whitelist’ - i.e. setting up your e-mail such that only a list of people defined by you can send you messages. It’s a pain to add everyone, and it is inconvenient for your contacts that just happen not to be in the list so they can’t send you mail - such is life in a world where spammers have free reign.
For spam-fighting resources, check out www.cauce.org and www.junkbusters.org.
Only 50-70? I have a Yahoo address I use as a spam-trap, and it gets over 250 pieces per day. My personal email gets far fewer, but I have found that my ISP has begun using MIMEDefang from roaringpenguin.com to assign a spam score to each piece of email I receive. I just make one rule in outlook to check the header for the string “spam=yes” and send it straight into the deleted folder. It is 99.9% effective, and almost never flags mail I really want.
To see if your ISP uses MIMEDefang, check the header and look near the end for a string that contains "spam-yes’ or “spam=no”. It could save you a lot of grief.
That amount of spams is to my personal address, one I have zealously guarded and never used on a web page. And I still get that many spams a day.
I also have a spam-bucket address that I use for web sites and such that want an e-mail address when registering. That address gets ~100-150/day, and those go in the trash.
So, does that mean you agree or disagree that this is a serious problem, one that may require more serious measures than every internet e-mail user practising good filter hygiene ? I lean towards the former – why should my elderly Mom with her dial-up connection have to deal with this crap?
squegee - read the links I gave - you will see you are in good company in hating spam and wanting something done about it. Hell, search this board (especially the BBQ pit) for “spam” in the subject line - you’ll find Dopers aren’t exactly keen on it either.
I guess I’m getting old enough to remember similar hysteria about junk mail. And again some years later about telemarketering.
Well, years have gone by, both of them are still around and going strong, and yet we the public still appear to be surviving.
So, RedDawgEsq, my advice to you is to just calm down. Go sit in the backyard and watch the stars at night. That’ll help put your SPAM emails in perspective.
P.S. Anyone still using Outlook for email can’t really be very serious about doing something to eliminate SPAM.