Best way to stop spam?

mousetater · Trooper Joined: Dec 24, 2003 Posts: 12 Location: USA

Have used MW off/on for awhile now. Here's my question: What is the best way to get off the spammers lists?
Bounce? Don't bounce? Learn? don't learn? I get maybe 1 or 2 a week to an hotmail addy. I get about 150/day (many of which contain a virus that is caught by NAV) to my cable isp addy. I am not posted in newsgroups or other. I actually setup a new addy with the cable isp, and IMMEDIATLY on checkin it, I had 2 spams. Anyway, what is the best way to stop it..TIA
Mark

stan_qaz · Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 9:55 pm Post subject:

Report your spam to spamcop.net and don't conceal your e-mail address, that will get you removed from the spammers that maintain their own lists. Nothing will get you off the Million Address CDS since they aren't maintained, just aded to.

Picking a good address helps too, nothing that looks like a name or is found in a dictionary.

rogerw · Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 10:46 pm Post subject:

stan_qaz · Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 11:51 pm Post subject:

I'd go for a spamcop.net account for $30 a year, it really makes it easy to report your spam!

AlphaCentauri · Captain Joined: Nov 20, 2003 Posts: 302 Location: USA

Ikeb · Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 1:35 pm Post subject:

As to SPAMers moving from IP to IP, a recent The Registry article might shed some light on this phenomena. I posted a reference over at the SPAM forum.

Byron · Corporal Joined: Jan 27, 2004 Posts: 51 Location: USA

Here is another look at Spam from Spamhaus

http://www.spamhaus.org/

Note that the top 10 ISP's include MCI, Comcast and Versizon

About 1/3 of mine is from Hotmail/MSN

I have a few groups at Yahoo groups, Spamcop is my worst nightmare,

Byron

jalberts · Corporal Joined: Nov 06, 2003 Posts: 57 Location: USA

AlphaCentauri · Captain Joined: Nov 20, 2003 Posts: 302 Location: USA

Remember when they found terrorists who were communicating by using a yahoo account and writing and saving emails but not sending them? Then the other terrorists would log in and read them without it having to actually be sent to an address.

But now with spam, they could function undetected by embedding coded messages in spam and sending it to a million people, including the intended recipient.

Byron · Corporal Joined: Jan 27, 2004 Posts: 51 Location: USA

Jeff

But MW is worth the money, My spam went from 480 a day to just 4 , Just using bounce, blacklist , delete.

I have deleted as many as 80 with just one click instead of the 14 clicks per message that M$not wants

As long as the feds leave it so that only Lawyers can make money at it or M$ can make money, it will always be a problem

Byron

jalberts · Corporal Joined: Nov 06, 2003 Posts: 57 Location: USA

But I've seen other threads that bouncing actually alerts spammers to valid addresses, and that claim was never disputed.

I still have to look at least at the subject of every spam message I get to make sure is isn't from a new customer, contact, etc. I can't trust MW to auto-delete anything.

When you say yours went from 480 a day to 4, does that mean only 4 come to your inbox? Or that the 480 are already flagged and ready to delete? If the latter, then nothing has been done to get rid of the spam, has it.

And I stil get leaks, since MW is not integrated with Outlook, I can check for mail in MW, then immediately go and do a send/receive in Outlook and still get the occasional slip-through. And of course that one could be carrying a trojan or virus. MW could do a lot more than it does...

Jeff

AlphaCentauri · Captain Joined: Nov 20, 2003 Posts: 302 Location: USA

Don't bounce -- it goes to the address in "From" which is forged, not to the IP in the "Received: from" field. Blacklisting is the same problem. Just report 'em and delete 'em.

jalberts · Corporal Joined: Nov 06, 2003 Posts: 57 Location: USA

You see, everyone says something different. What do the MW people say?

AlphaCentauri · Captain Joined: Nov 20, 2003 Posts: 302 Location: USA

They haven't removed the feature, so they aren't ready to admit that bouncing no longer helps. But I still find mailwasher worth it since it gives me so much ability to structure logical expressions and sort the spam. My display not only labels spam and legit mail, it lets me group those that are no way in hell legitimate and those that require at least a cursory look over. It also links to FirstAlert (picks up 25% of my spam, but my filters usually get to it first -- I'm hoping that it will keep my inbox from overflowing during an upcoming camping vacation) and reports spam to SpamCop who then notify the administrators for the IP's where it is originating and the URL's that are advertised. Many actually will shut the spammers down.

jalberts · Corporal Joined: Nov 06, 2003 Posts: 57 Location: USA

Not according to recent findings. A link to The Register in another topic hereabouts says 80% of spam is coming from Zombie PCs infected with trojans.

Banning IP addresses only really hurts the legit people who pay those hosts for service. I was a victim of this. My host was placed on a blacklist becuase some fly-by-night customer signed up for a cheapie account and started spamming. The Ip got blackisted, his account was deleted by the host, he moved on. Now the people that were left were still being blacklisted, not having ever been spammers, nor ever planning to be.

It took months for me to straighten it out, and had to obtain an email address from another domain and IP range in order to do business properly.

It doesn't seem like they contact the admins for these ISPs, seems like they just blacklist them, and have done with it. Not an effective method.

No, the spammer wasn't harmed at all, only the innocent paying customers.


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