My current email is drowning in SPAM. Where should I get a new account?

[djtoast]

Originally Posted by ZeroSignal

This allows you to give out a different alias something@yourdomain.co.uk to every site, and block that particular address if you receive spam on it.

That's what I do, although it's never turned up any spam yet. I'm just waiting to get viagra spam addressed to britishairways@mydomain.com

I get very little spam, but the one thing I can't quite figure out is how the stuff I do get which goes to my fools-gold.net account has my full name prefixing the address, (ie MY NAME<address@fools-gold.net> ) removing one of the easiest ways to block stuff.

[nevali]

Your full name is in the WHOIS data.

They'll combine that, and randomthing@gools-gold.net to produce a likely-looking address.

[djtoast]

Oh of course.

Yeah, couple of cheeky bits of snailmail spam from the first site I registered before the value of not putting your home address occurred to me. Naïve, me?

[nevali]

Aye. ‘Domain Registry of {America,Europe}’ is a common one—made out to look like a renewal form when really it's assigning them registrar rights at a hefty fee.

I think the OFT got involved in that lot after complaints from Nominet.

[djtoast]

That was the one. Cheeky blighters.

It's only the last six months I've really had any spam and it's probably two a day now so not the end of the world but it's still frustrating that it's hard to beat 'em.

In the current ones the spam content is just a gif, with the usual "random" words after it, and comes from a wholly different domain each time (or purports to.) Whaddya do about that?

The subject is always four words in a particular arrangement of parts of speech, immediately obvious to a person, but how do you tell a mail program that?

But even more so than with the spammers, I'm exhasperated by the few sods out there who must presumably buy Licenced Love Life Enhancer pills for it to be worth spammers spamming.

[nevali]

Use an e-mail client that filters effectively and uses Bayesian filtering to learn what spam looks like.

e.g., Apple Mail, or Thunderbird.

I get maybe 1-2 a day which it doesn't catch, out of 80-100 that it does.

[djtoast]

I use Mail. It's pretty good at putting all the spam in junk but I can't send that all to the trash cos it's pretty bad at also putting legitimate mail in the junk mailbox. So I still see all my spam at some stage.

[nevali]

Do you click ‘Not junk’ when it incorrectly identifies something?

[djtoast]

Yeah, but it's usually stuff like when I book a hotel or flights or something, confirmations almost always end up in there.

[nevali]

Ah, yeah… but, you know it's due to arrive. You can hunt it down fairly easily when you're expecting it. There's only so much a spam filter can intelligently figure out when legitimate e-mail is so badly-behaved

You can't bin it automatically, but if you're not expecting anything, it's usually safe to do a ‘delete all junk mail’ after a quick scan of the mailbox.