Grrrrr.. Spam!!

[the_dumper]

Anyone recommend a decent spam filter, I get about eight - ten of these things a day now and it's starting to annoy me!!
More worrying is that most of them seem to be for penis enlargement pills, I even had two for a penis enlargement patch this morning Ha Ha.
I think they were junk mails, maybe it's my wife trying to tell me something.........

 

[adder70]

the_dumper once bubbled...
Anyone recommend a decent spam filter, I get about eight - ten of these things a day now and it's starting to annoy me!!
More worrying is that most of them seem to be for penis enlargement pills, I even had two for a penis enlargement patch this morning Ha Ha.
I think they were junk mails, maybe it's my wife trying to tell me something.........

Filters rarely work. The spammers just change the wording enough to defeat the filter. hence subjects like, "en l@ rge yo ur P e n i $" Then it sucks for anyone with email about people with unfortunate names like Cox (obvious) or Young (gotta stop child porn, right? too bad your name is pornographic!) My filter at work (IHateSPAM) filters out the subject line "interesting article" and places it in the quarantine folder. It also tends to quarantine just about anything with an exclamation point at the end.

About the only way to stop them is to make sure NO spam emails are opened for at least 6 months. Then they begin to think it's a dead account and stop.

This means switch to a backup email address and let you box fill until the provider send messages that the box is full and/or inactive for months, or to be VERY careful about only opening emails that are from people you know. This includes disabling the preview pane if you use Outlook. I don't know about other programs, but Outlook opens the email after just a second or two of preview.

The biggest thing is to take it as a personal offense if anyone responds to any spam email, period. Ridicule and show anger towards the people who support this practice. That is the root of the problem. Some people respond and buy/donate, or they would all go out of business. I take that same attitude with people who respond to doorstep flyers or telemarketers. Just remember, every purchase is worth about 200 calls or about 2 billion spam emails.

Good luck.

 

[loosebits]

PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) uses Bayesian statistics to classify mail. It's a bunch of math stuff but here's the simple version. You train PopFile with a hole bunch of e-mails (here, PopFile, these are all Spam, all these e-mail are about dive vacations and these are all personal e-mails). PopFile looks at the words in all of the e-mails and determines that 80% of all e-mail with the word 'click' are spam and 60% of all e-mails with the word 'damn it' are from your wife. When you get a new message, it looks at all of these percentages and determines what group the message most likely belongs to. You can set up as many groups as you want but the more groups you set up, the more errors Popfile will make. If PopFile miscategorizes a message, you tell it that it's wrong and it will get a little better. If you have a bunch of existing e-mails, you can use those to train PopFile, if you don't, it will just learn as new ones come in.

By the way, it is free and open souce (as us in the geek community say, free as in speech and free as in beer).

 

[Green Mountain]

Being an old dude, I am not very knowledgeable about computers.

I have discovered that since I have my email through yahoo the spam has stopped. If something does happen to get through because of something that I have ordered all I have to do is hit the "This is spam" botton and I never hear from them again.

 

[Dive Source]

I have been using Mailwasher for over a year with good results and it's free or you can buy the pro version.

The pro version can also be configured to check hotmail accounts.

What it does is act like an email client and pick's up the header from your email, looks for spam and you can view them before downloading. You can add people to the spam list and it also uses spamcop etc for known spammer addresses

Here is the linkMail Washer