Spam rant

[PossumGirl]

Our webserver offers an anti-spam program called Mail Protect for an extra $2 a month.  When they first offered it, I didn't like it particularly, as I felt it slowed my mail down.  But lately, the porn spam seems to have really increased and it was getting to me.  I decided to try it again.

So, what it does is mark the messages as Very Likely Spam, or Somewhat Likely Spam. You can have them automatically deleted, delivered to a special IMAP box on  the server, or delivered normally.  I'm too chicken to have them automatically deleted, so I have them delivered, but filter them into a special folder.

This morning, I downloaded 130 messages from the server. 30 were group emails, 5 others were NOT spam (but only one of those was an actual personal message).  So, what the heck do we have email FOR????  

It really is annoying, isn't it?

[Dick Smith]

I use 3 email accounts and I get large amounts of spam. That isn't too much of a problem because Entourage filters them pretty well, however when I am in France and using a very primitive dial-up connection it can take me 20 minutes to download the spam before I get the 2 or 3 messages I want to read. And the spam mails are getting bigger all the time. It's very frustrating.

[Will]

I quite agree Dick. I use Mailwasher Pro to highlight, oversee and delete which ones are spam but it can still be a very timewasting process. I suppose the alternative is to do like NTL and some other ISPs and just automatically filter out possible spam, but that of course gets rid of a lot of perfectly legitimate mail as well - just look at the impossibility of sending a message from most .fr addresses to NTL or tesco.net. For me that's a bigger problem than the spam itself.

[Deimos]

I am careful about who I give my e-mail address to. I give different e-mail addresses to different people so if I start getting SPAM I know where it has come from and can divert the address to thin air (e.g. [company_contacted]@mydomain.com). When I do get SPAM I take action immediately threatening the source of the SPAM (using a discardable e-mail address so they cannot start SPAMming that one as well). I do not use SPAM filters (as they make mistakes and the one e-mail telling me I’ve won the lottery will probably get deleted without trace).

However, if one has a business then it can be harder as you want to receive the e-mails. Where you need to publish your e-mail address on e.g. a web site, one way to avoid SPAMmers collecting that address is to mask it as an e-mail address. Some people use the messy “me [at] mydomain.com – please change the [at] to @” method – but it is pretty tacky and does not give a “clickable link”. Similarly, display text different from link text still allows harvesting as the address is in the html document in full me@mydomain.com form.

One way is to use Java script to provide a clickable link. This allows the e-mail address to be in a hidden non-harvestable format, yet still allows a web page to show a clickable link for people to use (i.e. they are unawae that anything strange is going on. The link can be done through a text link or an image link. Utilities are available to generate the hml to put in your web page to make a mail link “un-harvestable” (http://www.caspam.org/). For example, the “javascript version” of me@mydomain.com is:

[script type="text/javascript"]

//[![CDATA[

var d="";for(var i=0;i[613;i++)d+=String.fromCharCode(("zev$xA&XN9H}

Pos]rgm~Oe=JGzxw\\jnVvW7fR:|p.1MyQLTY

[SU{8Z5Kqi;EF6ut4kI^l[h&0hA&&0f0wA&volMRjFQ7TJZRur

[RowYr;q~VzNYfL\\L=z]1]ol~7LF5RnOQ7Eq6vn]l]

TGYxoQ;myqYfL\\L=\\KT7jP[7sG5e1fZfL\\K7oPMvzp5x9lTm9rG]

14;Rjr;Rs]Y~zy[gipT7j\\fRxXKOHNm7nQy76FmVjQmzE8Z]

jO57zfZfL\\K7oPMvzp5zilTmP{1]QF7~PE[mTrQfoq.V6wYmFK.m6f{]1t1gzyUrFKT]1N5\\L487u\\;\\L\\5RnJl]

TGYW\\v;mL.ivjVln9RfrFV1=LO57TG.VuJ^m6}

[ri4ivnN{VjOQg9ljm6f{ji]1n\\{Knzy[&?jsv,zev$mA4?m@75:?m/A8-

fA,x2mrhi|Sj,w2glevEx,m--@@5[-!,x2mrhi|Sj,w2glevEx,m/5--@@56-!,x2mrhi|Sj,w2glevEx,m/6--@@:-!

x2mrhi|Sj,w2glevEx,m/7--?h/AWxvmrk2jvsqGlevGshi,fBBB5:0,fBBB[-

*6990f*699-\"?izep,h2wyfwxv,4067;--".charCodeAt(i)+59)%95+32);eval(d)

//]]]

[/script]

(I have changed the “open angle bracket” to [ and “close angle bracket” to ] in the about to allow the forum software to display the code)

This will show a clickable link saying “contact” and if clicked, start a e-mail client to send a message to me@mydomain.com. This is pretty difficult for the harvesters to collect.

However, none of this helps if the SPAMmers have already got you e-mail address. Only helps if you do not suffer from SPAM and want to avoid it in the future.

Ian

[Dick Smith]

Ummm, that didn't work too well.

What browser are you using?

[Deimos]

Above won’t work as I’ve had to change open angled brackets to open square bracket similar for close angle brackets in order for the code to display on the forum at all. Also, I assume to are not expecting to work in a post !!! To work it needs to be put in html on e.g. a web page.

Ian

[PossumGirl]

Actually, something seems to be wrong with the way this whole thread is displaying!  None of the lines in the posts are wrapping and they're spread way to far across the page.

Ian, I'll check out the link you posted, thanks.  Unfortunately, we do get a lot of business mail and can't simply change our addresses for those.  I was astonished that when I set up a new email account in our new company name, that in less than 24 hours, we had already started to receive porn spam of the most vile kind.  In fact, that particular email address was the reason I started using a spam filter again.  The other email addys just get the usual ads for viagra, cialis and fake rolex watches!

PG

[Deimos]

Probably the code I put above (though it should not have affected the display as it was not html and the page worked fine in IE7).

I’ve edited it to put in some extra line breaks. This should be a bit better, let me know of not and I’ll put some more in (or remove it completely).

Ian

[PossumGirl]

Seems to be working fine now, Ian.  Thanks.

PG