Help - junk mail

[drathzel]

Hey everyone

I get loads of junk mail! About 300 pieces a day.

I know there is a website you can go to thats stops spam emails but i have no idea what the address is. Could someone help me please.

thanks

[David Bailey]

Funny you should say that... I keep getting a lot of spam from a dance organisation - let's call them, oooh, "Nirvana" - despite my efforts to mark them as junk.

They cunningly change their originator email ID, so that the mail appears from a person, from a Team Nirvana, or whatever, so they keep getting through. And yes, I've sent them an email asking to be taken off the mailing list, to no result. Sneaky beggars.

[drathzel]

we must be getting cross emails as mine all seem to be for viagra and enlargements

[Dreadful Scathe]

i use googlemail for all my mail now and i only see 1 or 2 spam emails a week - that includes picking up my normal pop3 mail through googlemail

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by drathzel

we must be getting cross emails as mine all seem to be for viagra and enlargements

Swap?

[drathzel]

Originally Posted by DavidJames

Swap?

ok

My email is set up so i have my own specific email address not just XXX@googlemail or whatever.

Its mac mail that its running on

[Wuzzle]

Originally Posted by drathzel

Hey everyone

I get loads of junk mail! About 300 pieces a day.

I know there is a website you can go to thats stops spam emails but i have no idea what the address is. Could someone help me please.

thanks

Well only thing i can think of that does what you say is Spam-Stop.com: Registration might work don't use it myself its says its free but i don't have time to check it out while at work...

You can get free software that looks through your email for various subject headers and content and automatically put it as spam. Though there is alot that you have to buy the software and it tries its best to take out the spam put it into another folder. Or delete it.

Hotmail and Yahoo provide extreme filtering so nothing apart from what you have in your address book lands in your inbox. Or very occasional at least.

Still 300 mails is a bit large. Do you have any public profiles bebo, myspace, facebook etc.... blogs or they all private for friends only? Worst thing to do is reply back to a spam. That just says to the spam program that you use the email address...

Heres a few links to free software:

Spamihilator download and review - spam filter from SnapFiles

Top 11 Free Spam Filters for Windows - About Email

See if that helps... a little

[drathzel]

Originally Posted by Wuzzle

Still 300 mails is a bit large. Do you have any public profiles bebo, myspace, facebook etc.... blogs or they all private for friends only? Worst thing to do is reply back to a spam. That just says to the spam program that you use the email address...

its my ceroc ni email address!

[Wuzzle]

Originally Posted by drathzel

ok

My email is set up so i have my own specific email address not just XXX@googlemail or whatever.

Its mac mail that its running on

Ummm mac mail..... well if its mac am not that much of an expert on them. Though i'd think there is similar programs for mac...

i guess google mac spam filter see what it comes up with...

[Dreadful Scathe]

Originally Posted by drathzel

My email is set up so i have my own specific email address not just XXX@googlemail or whatever.

So do i - i have 4 pop3 accounts and 1 other gmail account i fetch with my main gmail account -all get filtered for spam - its the best solution especially when i find gmail to be so much better than any desktop mail program Ive ever used

[Wuzzle]

Originally Posted by drathzel

its my ceroc ni email address!

How do you feel about purchasing mac software that will filter out your junk mail?

Macintosh software · Spamfire 2 - Protection & Revenge · Free Download

Other than that its just search the net for junkmail filtering for mac which is free

Sorry i don't know much about mac mail

[drathzel]

i dont mind purchasing something but a few years back a friend gave me a website that i could put my email address into and it stoped me getting the bulk/spam mail that companies were sending out. It worked and i still got my personal emails.

Its kinda that thing that i am looking for.

I think it might have been the same company you can use to stop getting sales calls from.

[timbp]

What email program do you use?
I use Thunderbird as my email program, and Spamato for filtering spam.

[Keefy]

Originally Posted by drathzel

i dont mind purchasing something but a few years back a friend gave me a website that i could put my email address into and it stoped me getting the bulk/spam mail that companies were sending out. It worked and i still got my personal emails.

Its kinda that thing that i am looking for.

I think it might have been the same company you can use to stop getting sales calls from.

If you're talking about some sort of opt out list then that will never work, the vast majority of spam is sent by zombie networks and they don't give a damn what list you're on! On that subject never, ever, reply to a 'click here to be removed...' type of link in an email - that just confirms your email address as a "gold" address (i.e. valid address, read by a human) and it is then worth money to be sold on to other spammers.

OK, two ways of doing this, I'm glad you said you wouldn't mind paying for a service as the best ones do cost money.

#1 : Look up 'hosted anti-spam' on Google. What these systems do is take over and host your actual mailbox and filter it for you, so what you download is only the good stuff. They can be a little geeky to set up (you need to change your DNS MX records, if you don't know what that means then get help ) but the hosted system are the best IMHO, the Rolls Royce of such services is probably MessageLabs, I've used them commercially and they are excellent. Try Home - Gradwell Dot Com for general small business email services as well, I've used them personally.

#2 : Look up 'spam filters' on Google. A filter is something that runs on your local computer and has a sneak preview of your mailbox for you, I use and recommend Mailwasher but I don't think you can get a Mac version of that.

You wont stop spam, it's the curse of the net. If I took off all of my personal filters/black holes I reckon I'd be getting in the 5,000 per day range, the worst I've ever had to deal with peaked at >1M per day.

HTH

[drathzel]

Originally Posted by timbp

What email program do you use?
I use Thunderbird as my email program, and Spamato for filtering spam.

i dont know my website dude set it up! Must really ask him but thought the forum might be a good place to start for help

[Dreadful Scathe]

Originally Posted by Keefy

OK, two ways of doing this, I'm glad you said you wouldn't mind paying for a service as the best ones do cost money.

nonsense with little anklet bells on. Gmail for one has an excellent spam filter and handles up to 5 pop3 accounts (per gmail address, if you need more, forward yet another gmail address). I don't see the issue with using a web page when its as good as gmail (use googletalk if you want a pop-up new mail app) as you do kinda have to be online to check mail anyway and you can back up gmail locally if you are worried about a network outage. Outlook sucks and although Thunderbird is slightly better, they both pale into dull piles of poo in the ever radiant light that is gmail.

Not that I have shares in Google or anything. I don't.

Got a friend that works there.

In San Francisco.

Which is nice.

[bigdjiver]

Yahoo offers free email and delivers most spam to a "bulk" folder, from where it is regularly automatically deleted without intervention.

Every once in a while I check at the bulk folder to see if any Ceroc Spam or other stuff I want to see has been put there, and flag it "not spam". Works well.

[Beowulf]

I swear by SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam

it DOES need a good batch of Spam (Bad email) and Ham (Good email) to build up it's database. After a few runs of you fine tweaking it the better it gets. I NEVER get any false positives (Ie good emails identified as spam) Occasionally as "suspected" and very rarely do I get false negatives (Spam identified as good email)

best of all.. it's FREE

just keep a selection of spam mails in a separate spam folder and once you've trained spambayes you can empty it out.

from the website

That's great, but what's SpamBayes?
(the non-technical hand-waving answer)

SpamBayes will attempt to classify incoming email messages as 'spam', 'ham' (good, non-spam email) or 'unsure'. This means you can have spam or unsure messages automatically filed away in a different mail folder, where it won't interrupt your email reading. First SpamBayes must be trained by each user to identify spam and ham. Essentially, you show SpamBayes a pile of email that you like (ham) and a pile you don't like (spam). SpamBayes will then analyze the piles for clues as to what makes the spam and ham different. For example; different words, differences in the mailer headers and content style. The system then uses these clues to examine new messages.

For instance, the word "Nigeria" appears often in spam, so you could use a spam filter which identifies anything with that word in it as spam. But what if your business involves writing a guidebook on Nigerian Wildlife Conservation? Clearly a more flexible approach is necessary. Additionally spammers will adapt their content over time and will no longer use the word "Nigeria" (or the words "Lose Weight Fast", or any number of other common lines). Ideally the software will be able to adapt as the spam changes.

So, that is what SpamBayes does. It compares the spam and the ham and calculates probabilities. For instance, for me, the word "weight" almost never occurs in legitimate email, but it occurs all the time in 'lose weight fast' spam. SpamBayes can then look at incoming email, extract the most significant clues and combine the probabilities to produce an overall rating of "spamminess". It flags the messages so that your mailer can handle the different message types. You might set it up so that ham goes straight through untouched, spam goes to a folder that you ignore (or delete without checking) and the unsure messages go to another folder which you can review for errors.