Unsubscribing From E-Junk - Effective?
 

I have had my email account since the days of 28K an 56K dial up.

I prefer to keep the account but the amount of spam has gotten crazy.

I changed my filters and every option I can think of but I still get a lot of "Russian Brides Need You" spam...

So I started clicking on the "Unsubscribe" links on the emails, which takes me to a new site where I enter my email and hit the "unsubscribe" button.

How stupid, in pleasant terms, am I for doing this?

Thanks.

Unsubscribe only really works for professional business spam. Mainly confirms your email address has someone that is at least looking at the emails.

Have had my current email account and address since 1990. At one point the anti-spam service I was using (Barracuda) told me I was getting a million spams a day, A DAY!

Have hosted email since then as well. Host email for 4 companies. Have used various spam filters both on my mail servers and hosted. Currently using Canit by Roaring Penguin. It is a hosted service so keeps the spam traffic off the server network. Rarely get spam to my inbox. Receive a quarantine message once a day listing 5 to 10 emails. Only a couple of times a month does it quarantine good emails. It is VERY affordable.

I worked with their support to set up a few rules that greatly reduced even quarantine. Some of my users were receiving over 400 spams a day that got past the other spam filters I have tried. Now they are seeing what I do. A comple per month to their inbox and a few a day to quarantine with very few false positives. There were a few rules I had to set up to keep from blocking some email, but it was because their corporate email servers were set up so poorly.

Be happy to talk to you about it, or even host your email. zipbang.com

I will be in touch.

Thanks!

Who is your email provider?
I get almost no spam, and my email is also from the 90s

AOL.


Don't shoot!

Paul, you need my email hosting, Glen and his company use it. They are thrilled. My server isn't exchange, but does active sync for smartphones. Don't make a profit off the cost. Just pays for keeping the hardware, software, and connection up-to-date shared between all the users. It's really more of a coop.

Not to detract from Richards offer but there are two other options available.

Wash your current email through gmail or move to hosted exchange.

After years dealing, rather effectively, with a clients spam issue I finally managed to get them on hosted exchange.

This is a PR firm so their email addresses are everywhere. We filtered 1.5M pieces of mail in one year and managed to filter 70% of the spam before hitting false positives.

Filtering is not easy. You need a combination of whitelisting, specific content based filters, subscribing to RBLs ( which are their own problem), configuring your servers to reject mail with improper headers or no PTR, DKiM, which a legitimate ending server will have set up properly but again not all the time.

Creating specific content filters is never ending. At some point it's near impossible to create them until after the spam arrives because you need to see what you are filtering for. Spammers know this and send in waves, you get the same crap multiple times simulataneously. They don't put enough in the email to allow for effective filters. You can set a filter for Invoice but if it's a business account that's going to cause false positives. And the next day it starts all over again with a new schema.

Gmail and hosted exchange work due to shear volume of clients. When you have millions of people you are handling mail for you are seeing a **** ton of spam that makes it easier to react to in real time resulting in the majority of your clients never seeing it.

Hosted exchange is a sweet deal. $12.50 a month gets you 99.9% spam free inbox plus licensing for the full office suite, word, excel, PowerPoint, outlook, on 5 concurrent devices Windows or Mac. You also get it on 5 concurrent mobile devices iOS, android, windows mobile. Plus a full terabyte of One Drive storage. There more benefits but honestly that is a massively good deal anyway you slice it.

And if it's for business, it's a write off.

I am not trying to sell you something or an expert but I have stayed in a Holiday Inn.

Here are the facts:
-Spammers also make money selling their lists to others.
-Spammers make more money on verified addresses. Unsubscribing from unsolicited mail just tells the spammer that your address is valid.

Therefore, when you hit unsubscribe, you are increasing the spam you will get (unless it is a valid business that you gave your address to). If you filter or ignore them they will eventually fade away but without a filter that may take a long time. There are many spam filter options (a lot of them free) that work for non-business needs. Most people start with a new address (with a slight variation of the old one so everyone who knows them will remember it) and be far more selective as to who you give your address to. I have an address for friends and family and a junk address for business solicitations that I will not use after the one time. The junk addy gets cleared once every 3 months.

YMMV.

Looks like everyone has you covered,


You know a fresh email address really filters out A LOT of stuff in your life. Including some spam emails. The important stuff will always find you.

AOL?

Dude. :confused:

I may have to rethink the massive amount of respect I've held for you all these years.

Dude, you have no idea how hard it was to type A...O...L.

I think it is time to change. I kept it because training my late father to change and use my email address would have been harder than climbing Annapurna.

Recommendations on a new email provider?

Suggestion: if you HAVE to keep the old address for someone who won't be able to adapt, then create a new one for everyone else and have you old address filter ALL mail except from that one person. Again, be sure to be more selective as to who you give your new address to and don't open or respond to spam.

Secure a domain based on your name.

Just be careful when crafting it. I did one based off our last name a bunch of years back, wanted Jenkins.com which was taken so added the first letter of my first name, sjenkins, taken, so I added the first letter of my wife's name, ssjenkins, available, cool.


Set up accounts and proudly announced to my lovely bride upon which she exclaimed, great, so I'm Stacy ass Jenkins?

Visualize it.


Use gmail for business or hosted exchange direct from MSFT.

It's fairly evident I'm often highly critical of MSFT but the product works and you get a lot of value. High bang for the buck ratio.

Hosting my own mail... when I show students the logs you can see the spam flowing to the wife and daughter's accounts, and being totally rejected.

Using postfix+spamassassin with a reverse lookup black list, checking spif and/or dkim records. What little spam makes it through to my account Thunderbird then takes care of.

One technique that I use for my own stuff is to use extended addressing. Anytime I have to give my email I add the business to the address. At least this way if I start getting spam I know who's CEO address I should look up and forward that unique address to him/her.

Like I said, I don't make anything, it's co-op.

Can't offer office subscriptions.
Office365 anti-spam is good, but not as good as Canit.

If you have your own domain you can set up hosted Canit for Office365 email for less than $1 a month.

The default domain for my mail server is zipbang.com. Can also register and host custom domains. I charge $12 per year for .com domain registration, setup, and management.

Godaddy also hosts Office365, haven't kept up with them so don't know how their monthly fees compare now.

If you are using Zipbang hosting or Canit (with your own domain for Office365) you can forward your AOL email to your new email address and Canit will still filter out the spam. And any replies will be with your new email address so it will eventually change your email address on everyone's client.

As part of my service I also provide an FTP server you can send very large files like drop box. You upload the file with a web interface or desktop app and it will provide a link to email people to download the large file. They just click the link and it downloads.

Zipbang also provides web hosting. The companies I host use that, but not many of the personal accounts want to mess with it. One user I set up a web photo gallery that her and her whole family could upload family pictures they collected. They have scanned and uploaded all their old family photo albums.

Some of my users have Office365 for the downloadable Office Apps, but still use zipbang.com for their email. Some of my users are Mac users that refuse to buy anything Microsoft and have other Office type apps.

Oh yeah, Zipbang mail also has a web interface but people rarely use it. They prefer having a local app. If you don't use the iCloud or find my phone apps the webmail provides a link to lock or wipe your smartphone.

Paul, go gmail!!!

Gmail, but for privacy reasons, don't do the prompt to use your name like: paul.XXXXX@gmail.com

Once you do that, it's all too easy for someone to find your home address, relatives, etc.

Agreed that Thunderbirds filtering is pretty good but requires frequent retraining.

My issue with RBLs is the emergence of what I refer to as predatory list maintainers.

It's a fairly recent, within the last year or two, problem.

There are a couple in Germany and also Australia.

They promote themselves as predictive lists. Meaning they'll add you if they THINK you may spam. They do this by monitoring other RBLs and if they see your IP block pop on even one of the 30 or so commonly known Listers bam you are in their list.

No big deal right, people get falsely blocked all the time.

Here's where the ****ery starts.

They provide no self delisting utility and ther is absolutely zero contact information available.

They will block addresses anywhere from a week to 30 days. The only way to expedite a delisting is to "make a donation". It's extortion.

I saw one of my clients clients get blocked for 3 month by the Aussie outfit.

Since most sys admins are lazy and just tick the "use RBl" feature without creating a curated RBL list you'll find yourself blocked frequently.

Not such a big deal for personal accounts but sucks big time for a business.

It's like this.

I own my servers.

I'm in full control to do whatever I want.

I have the tools and knowledge to use them.

I only use them if someone asks me to on their behalf.

I wash all my personal mail through gmail.

Ain't no one got time to deal with that crap unless it comes with a monthly retainer check

I'm at almost zero spam on gmail; they do send some stuff to the junk folder and I delete in every once and awhile- never had a good email go to junk.