TIP: Dealing with SPAM

richard · 8th March 2003

Credit: Eladesor @ Everythingbutcomputers.net

Fried Spam Recipe!

Many of you have recently told us you are being bombarded with useless garbage Spam.
You know, the truly rotten stuff that repeatedly finds it's way back to your inbox
day after day. Need some advice? Then sit right back and you'll hear a tale. A tale
of a faithful employee armed with just enough information to fry some spam.

1. Never "forward" or "reply" to spam email. Every time you reply you validate your
email address and will be added to more spam email lists.
2. Never "Unsubscribe" to spam email. Every time you do this you are adding yourself
to even more spam lists.
3. Just delete the spam email without reading it. You can usually tell spam from the
To address and/or the Subject.
4. Set up a filter to automatically delete know spam using your Outlook or Outlook
Express "organize" feature.
5. Never give out your email address while on-line to gain access to a website, or
for any other reason, unless you trust the source.
6. Never allow your email address to be included in "group" emails where everyone in
the group can see you email address. If you see your name in a long known group
list, email the sender to remove you at once.
Remember that spammers use tricks to send you their email. They will entice you
"Unsubscribe" or "reply". They will send you email that is actually addressed to
others and Blind Carbon Copied (BCC) to you. They will make the spam email look like
it came from someone else. You can not always trust the "From" address.

Spammers target their victims by collecting random email addresses from several
sources. Likely sources are from email you sent to unknown sources, email you
received from others as part of a group or list, and from forward emails that did
not have your email address removed first. Other sources are from completing on-line
forms and registering for FREE stuff on the internet, including daily joke and
picture email lists. Anytime you give out your email address you are increasing the
risk of receiving more spam. BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN GIVING OUT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS TO
UNKNOWN SOURCES.

Cyberprog · 17th July 2003

The use of Realtime Blackholes has drastically cut the ammount of spam I recieve, along with Cloudmark Spamnet I only have to deal with 1 or 2 a day now...

richardys · 5th August 2003

can anyone recommend any cheap/free anti-spam programs for servers and/or clients.

Server:-
Mail Server: Mailenable
OS: Win2003

Client:-
OS: WinXP

othellotech · 5th August 2003

yup, upgrade to the latest version of windoze - codenamed redhat9 and install spamassassin

blacknight · 9th September 2003

Quote:

Originally Posted by richardys

can anyone recommend any cheap/free anti-spam programs for servers and/or clients.

Server:-
Mail Server: Mailenable
OS: Win2003

Client:-
OS: WinXP

The only viable solution for windows' servers is to use a remote virus and spam filtering service. Pricing and details will vary, but there are a number of solutions out there. Check out Whitemail (http://www.hivercon.com/whitemail/) or Antivirus (http://www.antivirus.ie) .

markcastle · 9th September 2003

Imail server includes excellent anti spam functionality, we've got it running with a number of blacklists and other features, including our down DNS black/whitelists... works a treat and the number of false positives is encouragingly low.

Alternatively, spamassassin can be made to work in the win32 platform.... remember that it is written in perl though so unless you are going to compile it it'll probably use a lot of resources. It's not an easy thing to get working by all accounts.

blacknight · 9th September 2003

To be honest I am yet to see a native win32 solution that can compare with our *nix solution.

markcastle · 9th September 2003

Have you tried Imail?

boncemeister · 12th September 2003

Quote:

Originally Posted by richardys

can anyone recommend any cheap/free anti-spam programs for servers and/or clients.

For spamassassin filtering of a pop3 account on windows, saproxy (free without support).
http://saproxy.bloomba.com/docs/faq.html
Or a similar proxy
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
Or do it the hard way
http://www.openhandhome.com/howtosa250.html

If Mailenable is any good, you should be able to integrate spamassassin, but you might be the first to do so (hard work compared to 'nix).
http://www.spamassassin.org

Cranky · 12th September 2003

Quote:

Originally Posted by othellotech

yup, upgrade to the latest version of windoze - codenamed redhat9 and install spamassassin

I'll second suppot for spamassassin if you can get it working on Windows. It's the best anti-spam prog I've had the pleasure of using.

json · 16th October 2003

Quote:

Originally Posted by richardys

can anyone recommend any cheap/free anti-spam programs for servers and/or clients.

Server:-
Mail Server: Mailenable
OS: Win2003

Client:-
OS: WinXP

The MailEnable mail server can use reverse DNS Blacklists (I know the Pro version can, not sure about the Std version). I've had it running for 3 weeks now, and using 2 different DNS lists, it has cut the spam by half (or more).

I don't use one for my clients, but some sort of content filtering could probably delete the rest (or almost).

regards,
J.

othellotech · 16th October 2003

Are there any blocklists/blacklists still actually working ? thought infinite monkeys was the last of them and it's gone now.

Sad to see them brought down by stupid DoS attacks from spammers.

markcastle · 16th October 2003

There are quite a few still working!
blackholes.easynet.nl is a pretty good one IMHO.

dwhswebhosting · 26th July 2004

I am surprised not to see spampal here, it's free and works great. It filters about %65 and never blocks a good email at least not for me.

I have a download here if you want to check it out:

http://www.dwhsdownload.com

There is some cool other free downloads I have tracked down.

I think spampal uses mail.abuse.org

Cyberprog · 27th July 2004

The use of SPF should cut down on spam and people using invalid from addresses I hope:
http://spf.pobox.com/