Spam attack

[andrewducker]

I've not had a problem with Spam for months. I still get around 40 spams a day, but with one or two exceptions they get funnelled straight into my Spam folder, where it takes less than 10 seconds total to look them over and hit the delete button. Not that it's really worth spending that time, as I've not had a false positive in at least two months. When I first installed Spamassassin it took a little bit of tweaking to let it know about the mailing lists I was on (and the other people on the notzen domain, which I host), but since that point, it's just run in the background, tirelessly examining emails, calculating their spamminess and then tagging the most likely ones with ***SPAM*** in the subject line. No fuss, no problem, no spam.

Those of you who still do get spam may, however, be interested in this interview with an ex-spammer. He doesn't spill all the beans, but he gives a fair amount of insight into how spammers run their businesses.

"The idea is it's just like a commercial," Shiels said. "You don't just send it to one address once. You send it to one address five or six times. Do commercials only come on once? You get the same crap in your e-mail more than once. You have to bombard the person."

Comments

[protempore.livejournal.com]

I don't know what you use for your mail client, but I've found that mozilla's mail client's relatively new SPAM filter is really quite smart -- once you 'train' it to know your tastes in email, it's nearly fool proof. (I'm using the mozilla based thunderbird mail client, but all up-to-date moz clients have it). Between that and Razor, which is installed on my mailserver, I receive virtually no SPAM in my inbox . . . pretty handy. (Razor does deliver it to a SPAM mailbox, so I can still check to make sure nothing I want is getting blocked.)

Fighting SPAM is almost fun, in this day and age, with all the technology to fight it with :-)

Thanks for the article, reading it now . . .

(Sorry for the dual posts, forgot a closing tag on the href...)

[broin.livejournal.com]

I quite like the idea of paying script kiddies to track down spammers. =)

[andrewducker]

I'm tempted by Mozilla's mail client, but not for another few versions. I'm very happy with my current Client (The Bat) which reflows text for me, indents marvellously and appends random quotes from my library into my .sig

[protempore.livejournal.com]

I used The Bat religiously from 96 or 97 until 2001 or 2002 . . . but, then I was in the military and needed a client that would support IMAP (so I could access mail web based or client based) . . . mozilla supports IMAP like no other. Becky was a good option BUT, as Becky was the sworn enemy of TB!, I wasn't about to make that cross over. Now, I'm no longer in the same position . . . but, I've been using moz for a little while and have become really used to this whole IMAP thing. Transporting all my mail from their web-based folders to TB would just be a terrible mess.

The thing I miss most . . . is TB's hard-wrapping in the editor. Loved the editor -- hard wrapped, fully justified text.

I even wrote a review for it at epinions.com (last I checked, TB still had it linked from their reviews page -- under alias 'opalminer')

I used to be really active in the bat maillist, too . . . they still talk about the long-awaited version 2.0? I swear, we've been waiting since the nineties . . . is it even in development anymore?

Fond memories. Now you've got me all choked up, Duck.

[andrewducker]

I'm using the latest version, which is 1.62. I'm not sure what they'd do in version 2, to be honest - there's very little that 1.62 doesn't do to my satisfaction.

[protempore.livejournal.com]

I'm really tempted to update to the most recent version and try switching back, but . . . IMAP!, man! . . . It's a great program, though, it really is. I still remember how I stumbled upon it . . . someone had the logo int he bottom right hand corner of their webpage as a personal link to it . . . it looked neat. I loved it. *sigh* I miss it, now. Ass hole.

:-)

If only there was an easy to way transplant all my files. Plus, moz's SPAM protections is pretty sweet. I used to have TB set up with some pretty complicated anti-spam filters that worked pretty well but . . . so much work.

I'm lazy.

[protempore.livejournal.com]

Even better, letting others pay script kiddies to track down spammers.

[andrewducker]

I'm occasionally tempted by IMAP, but last time I tried to use an IMAP server it all went a bit odd and I found that different clients interacted differently with it.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in this similar article:

Guardian Article On Spam

[protempore.livejournal.com]

Ah, here I go bringing this thread to life again -- damn me, but . . .
I'd decided to give the bat a try again, I realized how much I missed it's clunky, simple, timeless interface and its more-than-meets-the-eye power . . . so I installed it (running the 1.63 beta, right now) . . . the transition from Mozilla to The Bat was much more simple than I'd anticipated -- turns out, they've REALLY enhanced the import feature. I just had to download all my IMAP mail to local mailboxes and run Bat's import . . . presto.

Of course, I missed Mozilla's splendid SPAM filtering, but . . . that was no big deal. I just installed POPFile, set up a couple of filters in TB and did a little training. We're all happy again. -- Popfile can modify your header tags so you don't have the subject altered, by the way . . .

anyway, Bat is sexy.