Is there really no way to stop the spam?
 

The stock market manipulators have compromised a 2nd email account of mine. I only use it here and with fellow Pelicans and friends. Never been published w/o the ususal "at" and "dot." Perhaps I have a worm in OE?

Anyway, I'm going to a 3rd (and new) addy to see if I can stay ahead of them. If they get me this time, I'm going off line AFA emails go and everyone can reach me thru the PM's. It really, really annoys me to open OE (this easiest and fastest that I have found) to see uninvited and illegal email.

Also, how do you delete something w/o opening it in OE? Verizon gives that option, but that is the slowest thing I have ever worked with, Even the spell check takes about a minute. OE is instant.

my old oe account would get around 150 spam emails per day, i called and had a new one assigned......it's been about 5 months with the new one and haven't had any spam yet.
i use yahoo for normal email crap, it's spam blocker works pretty good.

I have 2 e-mail accounts, one for my real e-mail the other for when I have to give one for a purchase etc..

The junk one has 251 e-mails in it right now and 99% of them are junk.

My good one has about 3 dozen e-mails and all of them have a purpose.

Maybe got you thru a dictionary attack, etc.

Might want to look into using Thunderbird for your mail. (www.mozilla.com, free and Free). It has a built in junk mail filter that you train and it is *really* good.

Or, get a gmail account. If you need an invite, pm me and I'll pm you the URL to go to create your account.

Spambot. Google it . Its free. It takes a bit to set up, and it needs some time to learn, but it is damn near 100% effective for me. I had about a 40% spam to mail ratio before. Best part is very few false positives.

Get a gmail account.

I have an account that I've had since ~1993; it gets around 40k spams a month now. No, really. If you don't believe me, send me your email and I'll put you in my .forward file for a couple hours :) For that account, I use a mix of procmail, SpamAssassin and Active Spam Killer, so very few spams actually get through, but I really have to be on the ball to catch false positives, which is why I'm moving to a gmail account.

For those of you that have good spam blockers, you may not have seen the stock manipulators methods. And that's great! They use a completely different email sever, account, host, whatever you call it. A different sender name and a different subject line. Then, there's about 250 words of nonsense included that looks like benign text. I think they are rather good at what they do. Of course, I can always spot it when I open my email and as I said, I can delete it where I have most of my commercial mail sent. I guess I screwed up by emailing some general questions to some of the suppliers we do business with using my more convenient account. Apparently, any mail sent is subject to interception and mining of the sender's addy.

I'll just move the current "convenient" addy out of my OE and let it all dump in the Verizon Mail Box. I can't change that, because that's my ISP. I guess I'll always get spam there. I even have a "vacation" reply that says I don't even look, but they (the spammers) don't allow replies, so they never see that nor care.

You know, it's just like the damn mail box on the front of my house. I get so much crap there that I have inadvertently shredded credit cards and viable bills. I grind up much every day as a matter of course. If it's prepaid postage and not expected, it gets shredded. Oh yeah, I written Mail Preference in NY and I've called in my numbers to the national do-not-call deal too. You think any of that stops mail and calls? Nope.

Actually, I don't mind the mail. If I get 30 pieces of junk a week, I know the PO is making some money. They need it to stay in business and we have the best mail service in the world, AFAIK.

I wish I could say that about the phones. Still, we have better than many. So, I guess I should just get over the spam and start a new email account every 3 months or so. I mean who cares if I end up with a hundred email addys. Not me. I will just look in the one that is the newest. Screw the rest.

gmail has the best out of the box spam filter that I've seen. They have a report spam feature and if even a small % of people use it google has got one hell of a list to work with.

I forward all my other accounts to it and let gmail do the filtering.

you also get online calendars, excell compatable spreadsheets, word etc...

It's pretty cool and the advertising is so unobtrusive that you forget it's there.

Scott

I don't have Gmail but I've found Yahoo to have a very good "junk" filter as well. They, as well as others, ask for account holders to pitch in by identifying mail as Spam as opposed to merely deleting...it's a one click operation as well.

At work I was completely spam free until someone sent me an E-greeting card. Once they volunteer your Email to these services you're toast. From that point on Spam was in my Inbox everyday.

no, I've seen the boiler room stuff-used to get tons of it. Spambot kills it. You've got nothing to lose, its free.

Milt did you buy a Mac or a PC?

The bulk of he 'boiler room' spam - hell, spam in general - is being generated from botnets of zillions of compromised PC's out there in the wild. You can't filter on specific senders/IP's. The random paragraphs are to get past Bayesian filters.

I recommend getting a gmail account; you can't beat the price!

How do the spammers getting your email address, if you are careful not to post it anywhere?

I read they send email to every possible made-up address at a given domain, and if the email doesn't get bounced as undeliverable, they know they have a "live" address.

If that is true, would it help to choose something extremely convoluted as your email address? So, for example, not zeke@domain.com but #z1-_%5hIj#2[{@domain.com?

I get a ton of spam myself, and am trying to figure out how to deal with it. The Thunderbird spam filter still lets through all the spam that uses an image rather than text. The Mac Mail spam filter works better.

If your email address is in the address book of a computer that has been compromised by spyware/adware then your email address is in the hands of the spammers.

Gmail has an excellent filter (and they nicely provide you with free "cooking with spam" recipes when you periodically purge the crap out of the spam folder). Yahoo's ain't bad. Hotmail's is not that great. The one one my home e-mail account (with Verizon) is damn near useless (the "filter" that Verizon provides with the service). I also have the spam filtering feature of Thunderbird enabled, which has proven completely worthless.

I'm not sure what we're using at work but it's EXTREMELY effective. In over two years there I think I've gotten one spam message and I've never had a legitimate e-mail blocked. I'm sure it's some kind of expensive hardware-based filter though - I'll check with I.T. to see if they'll tell me what it is.

For personal use, I'd say stick with the gmail account. Great interface, easy to use, good spam filter and able to be checked anywhere. Can't beat that.

This article sez 80% of the spam comes from the same 10 people.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35716

And just coincidentally the factory clip on my Ruger P9 holds 10 rounds. . .