Great e-mail Spam filter - SpamEater - Try it free -

[K1JJ]

Hola,

The spam has been getting worse these days. It crossed the line when I started getting lots of emails from Canada about cheap drugs, etc. Then stock picks every day. And the worst was those random text generators. That was it.

So, today I did somethng about it. I did a search for spam software reviews and found that SpamEater is the best out there for $24.50. They give a 30 day free trial.

I installed it and found it to be very powerful with many toggles and ability to add new filters and rules. It was not hard to install and get working.

Anyway, now it checks my server every few minutes and lets me glance at the blocked emails before they enter the mail program.  It flags the bad ones right away. I did a test and sent lots of emails to myself.  The normal emails, even though some were on the border of looking like spam, came through OK. But all of the bad spams I pulled out of the trash and resent got eaten up by SpamEater. Not one made it through.
Now only good emails are forwarded to the mail program automatically. The result is a listing of clean emails from people I know, and a quarantined batch of spam.

They do updates on site for the latest rules and filters. There's hundreds of filters in the data base. 

It works really well and I would reccomend it. Now it's fun to check and see the trash all backed up trying to get in and giving it the delete key. I love it!

Download a free trial at:
http://www.hms.com/download.asp

 

T

[WA1GFZ]

Tom Vu,
I get very little spam with SBC DSL. I'm lucky to get 1 a day. fc

[w3jn]

The best defense by far is to not make yourself vulnerable to it in the first place.  Don't post your email address anywhere on the internet where it's publically accessible, and use a free throwaway (Fastmail.fm is my favorite, no ads or slow loading graphics BS) for times you gotta register to use a website, etc.

The only spam I got on my old direcway.com email address was from when I stupidly signed up for a ridiculous high school reunion website.  Other than that, in almost 3 years, NOTHING.

[W1RKW]

I get some spam occasionally and I simply bounce the email making my email address look like it's non-existant.

Another problem that exists with spammers are email address mining programs or viruses.  If one person has an email address mining virus on their machine their address books become targets.

[w1guh]

I've been using yahoo email for years and their built in spam protection is top-notch.  Once you let 'em know that a piece of mail is spam it goes directly into you bulk folder and you never see it, or anything else from that address.

'Course lots of people think yahoo mail is lousy just because it's free....so...and I admit, for serious e-mail I use a forwarding service.  But it's true that spam problems simply don't exist with yahoo mail.

[k4kyv]

I have used Hotmail for years, even before Micro$haft acquired it.  At one time, I was getting up to 100 spams a day.  Then they upgraded their spam filter, and now, maybe 2 or 3 a week come through.  I use the hotmail address for mailing lists and newsletters.  I have carefully guarded my ISP e-mail address, but somehow a few of the junk mailers got me on their  list.  I often get 3-4 messages a day.

Hotmail is full of annoying flashing banner ads.  I completely got rid of them in Hotmail and other web sites by installing a custom HOSTS file. Websites load up much faster because I don't have to wait for all the junk url's to load up when I access a site.   For details on a free download, click the link below:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm



BTW, does anyone know the reason for the random character generated messages?

[W3SLK]

I have been running with Earthlink since they acquired the uplink.net domain. They use Brightmail's protocol. You can set up to 3 levels of spam filtering. If the sender's address isn't in your online address book, the message gets placed in the 'Suspect' folder. Where I determine whether its spam or its ligitimate. If its spam, I notify it and I can make it so that anything with the same domain name, automatically goes into the spam vault. Its been over three years since the last time I had spam get to my computer.

[K1JJ]

Most of the spammers randomly change their mail addresses and name on each mailing. I don't remember ever seeing one from the same bum.


Another tactic they use is to put the text into an imbedded Gif or jpg or whatever. This way the spam program can't read the pitch. But, I wud imagine a good program could scan or convert it into text. I don't know enuff about it. I see these "image " spams get through easier and need more filters than text.

There's so many filters, like "too many CC adrs, too many capital letters, words like Rolex, Viagra, and many countires are blocked like Nigeria, etc etc. They do let ya peek before eating them up in case it came from Mr Vu in Vietnam.

  Today I was spam-free using the new program. It appears Comcast doe not have much of an anti spam filter.


T

[w3jn]

The reason it's better to prevent spam in the first place is that spam filters tend to filter out valid emails - at least Yahoo and Verizon do.  I had to disable the spam filter on my Verizon email because I wasn't getting ANYTHING.  My wife uses Yahoo and every once in a while she's gotta poke around the bulk folder to find something she's missing.

I've almost had to post negative feedback to an ebay buyer because he never got any of my emails because of his stupid spam filter.  I finally got ahold of him on the phone.

Don, we've had this discussion before, but I gotta reiterate that it amazes me that anyone uses Hotmail, Yahoo, mail.com (absolutely the WORST free email service), or any other bloated/slow/ad-laden service when there's fastmail.fm and gmail.  Try fastmail, it loads really fast w/no ads/graphic BS and there's lots of cool features like "bounce", autoforward, etc.

73 John

[w1guh]

"but I gotta reiterate that it amazes me that anyone uses Hotmail, Yahoo, mail.com"

Because they work, and work well.

[K1JJ]

Does the "bounce" tactic really work?   I read some time ago that it simply validates the address to the spammers rather than pretend it's invalid.

These days, if an email account is closed, do they still do a bounce?

I have that feature on this software too, but haven't used it yet.

T

[W1RKW]

Hi Tom,

I can't say that bouncing works to discourage spamming as the spamming continues but what I do know from using Mailwasher for the last year or so that I have many spam domains that I have blacklisted. And many of the spams come from these open relay domains rather regularly. And I think I'm getting them from one or two sources based on the character of the spams.  At somepoint in time I will be turning on Mailwasher to run automatically and just start bouncing stuff as soon as it hits the server then I will never have to see any spam or at least severely minimize it.

To answer your question, an email will bounce if the account is closed. But then it depends on what you mean by closed. If the email address has been canceled by the user because the user changed his/her email address, ISP or didn't pay his internet bill then email to that address will bounce back to the sender because the email address is invalid.  On the other hand, if you mean closed by turning off the email to that address, the address is still good but is not accepting email.  In which case the senders email will simply be bounced with a notice stating the recipient is not accepting email at this address. So that validates that the email address is still a good address.

The Mailwasher program I use will bounce an email right from the ISP server never hitting my inbox on my PC which assures me that I don't have to worry about virus's and other BS. I essentially screen what is sitting on the server for each email address in the household before allowing it into the our computers.  I suspect the program you have does the same thing. Mailwasher will make it look like your email address doesn't exist.  The key is a quick bounce back. The drawback is spam can sit on the server until I tell it to go bye-bye. So a spammer may not get a bounce back for several hours after they've done their spam duty. So that in a sense can validate the address as existing.  However, I have sent emails that have had invalid addresses and have had them bounce back days after sending them so who knows.  Maybe an internet expert can shed some light on this better than I can.

Eventually, when I put Mailwasher into auto mode the bounces will happen as soon as they are detected on the server.  Right now I have the program running in learning mode for the blacklist and I'm still building a friends list. Once that is complete maybe these open relay domains will wonder why their servers are always clogged up and not allow open relaying.

[w3jn]

"but I gotta reiterate that it amazes me that anyone uses Hotmail, Yahoo, mail.com"

Because they work, and work well.

As with radios, some mail services work better than others 

[John Holotko]

Most of the spammers randomly change their mail addresses and name on each mailing. I don't remember ever seeing one from the same bum.


Another tactic they use is to put the text into an imbedded Gif or jpg or whatever. This way the spam program can't read the pitch. But, I wud imagine a good program could scan or convert it into text. I don't know enuff about it. I see these "image " spams get through easier and need more filters than text.

There's so many filters, like "too many CC adrs, too many capital letters, words like Rolex, Viagra, and many countires are blocked like Nigeria, etc etc. They do let ya peek before eating them up in case it came from Mr Vu in Vietnam.

  Today I was spam-free using the new program. It appears Comcast doe not have much of an anti spam filter.


T

The best kind of spam filter that  I have experimented and used to date is a probability based spam filter.  Such a filter works by breaking the message into tokens, then taking a sampling of the tokens and computing the probability that the message is spam based on the combined probability of the tokens thet comprise the message. Such a filter needs to be trained by analysing known samples of spam versus non-spam so that it can assign a probablitiy to each token regarding the likihood that the token is spam. For example token words like "viagra", "xanax", "nude", etc would carry  a high spam probability while words like "and", "the"  might be neutral while words like "811A", "class E", "antenna", might have a low spam probability.

Some spammers try and put random generated words, sentences and paragraphs into their spam mails to try and fool probability based spam filters. Thus far these techniques seems to fail. My spam filter has yet to mistake one of these for legitimate email.

Lastly other email charachteristics give the message away. Most legitimate emails containing images usually contain some text. But emails containing nothing but a link to an image, or an attatchedf image are usually spam and my filter almost always flags them as spam.

There are many probablilty based spam filters (also called statistical or sometimes Bayesian) available comemrcially and for free. However I decided to design my own. I've had it in operation for over two full years now, and I improved upon it a bit this past winter. It catches practically  98-99% of all the spam that crosses into my  mailbox, it rarely gives false positives and seldom needs to be retrained. All in all I would have to say thatprobabilkity/statistical spam filters are the way to go.

[w1guh]

Again...

I have used two yahoo email addresses for years and years and years.  One (my main one) is paul_harmony@yahoo.com, the other is w1guh@yahoo.com.  I have NO FEAR at all posting those publicly because their spam filter is TOTALLY GOOD.  Yahoo is a great organization that does things right.

My paul_harmony address gets lots of spam.  I typically see about 3 or 4 of them when I check my in box.  When I do, it's a VERY EASY and QUICK effort to check the box "This is spam", and Yahoo takes care of business.

I periodically check my bulk folder for stuff that I should have seen and I have NEVER seen a wrong email there.

Ergo..Yahoo mail GETS THE JOB DONE.  And this is after years and years that that address has been totally exposed publicly.

So....

I guess that there's awful bias against a "free" email service.  But...Yahoo does it right.

IMHO...you can be comfortable about your email account there.

But, again, for reasons beyond Yahoo's control...you need to supply a "respectable" (e.g. not free) email address.  That being the case...use what you have to there...but if you're smart...make it a forwarding service.

The trouble is...if that's your isp (aol...rr...whatever), that's going to gets lots of uncontrolled spam.

Please...knock off the disparaging remarks about Yahoo, and don't discriminate against them because they're really good at what they're doing.

You DO NOT NEED to spend money filtering spam.  Yahoo does it VERY WELL.

73,

Paul

[k4kyv]

Another good free one is myway.com.  They do not host banner ads.  I use mine for a couple of newsletters, since my Hotmail account is pretty full of stuff I subscribe to.

Another use for the Hotmail account (Yahoo would do just as well) is for over-the-air initiated correspondence.  It's very easy for anyone to remember "your callsign@ hotmail.com" or yahoo.com even if they don't have a pen handy at the moment to write it down.

I reserve my ISP address for business correspondence where a "respectable" e-mail address is preferable, and for some personal correspondence.  Even so, I get a little spam.  Not sure where I slipped up.

[W1RKW]

Don, How did you determine the web addresses of these junk URL's?  Is there a way to determine what IP addresses or web addresses are embedded into a particular website that brings up these junk URL's in an effort to block them with the hosts file? Is there a log file in Wiindows that lists all the web addresses that are being accessed from a particular web address? 

I've wondered about the random character generator thing too.  What's it's purpose other than to test my eyesight and my brains ability to interpret.

I have used Hotmail for years, even before Micro$haft acquired it.  At one time, I was getting up to 100 spams a day.  Then they upgraded their spam filter, and now, maybe 2 or 3 a week come through.  I use the hotmail address for mailing lists and newsletters.  I have carefully guarded my ISP e-mail address, but somehow a few of the junk mailers got me on their  list.  I often get 3-4 messages a day.

Hotmail is full of annoying flashing banner ads.  I completely got rid of them in Hotmail and other web sites by installing a custom HOSTS file. Websites load up much faster because I don't have to wait for all the junk url's to load up when I access a site.   For details on a free download, click the link below:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm



BTW, does anyone know the reason for the random character generated messages?

[WB1AEX]

Wait a minute Tom. You mean those emails that I have been getting with the headers like:

"Housewives need it too" and "Me so horny for you" aren't real? Damn, I thought that I had like hundreds of secret admirers...

Rob WB1AEX

[k4kyv]

Don, How did you determine the web addresses of these junk URL's? 

The HOSTS file does it for you.  They compile the data, just like the anti-virus websites do.  Every couple of weeks, I get an e-mail with an updated list.  I download the file, de-compress (unzip) it, and save it to the ETC file in Windows.  I get a prompt to replace the existing file with the new one.

Here is a sample of what my currently updated HOSTS file looks like (it is a simple text document).

# This MVPS HOSTS file is a free download from:           #
# http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/                        #
#                                                         #
# Notes: the browser does not read this "#" symbol        #
# You can create your own notes, after the # symbol       #
# This *must* be the first line: 127.0.0.1     localhost  #
# ********************************************************#
# ------------------Updated: 04-20-06---------------------#
# ********************************************************#
# Entries marked with Parasite or Trojan comments should  #
# be placed in the Internet Explorer Restricted Zone.     #
# http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/restricted.htm              #
#                                                         #
# Entries with other comments are searchable via Google.  #
#                                                         #
# Disclaimer: this file is free to use, however it is NOT #
# permitted to post on any other site without permission. #
#                                                         #
# This work is licensed under the Creative Commons        #
# Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.           #
# http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/       #

127.0.0.1  localhost

#start of lines added by WinHelp2002
# [Misc A - Z]
127.0.0.1  phpadsnew.abac.com
127.0.0.1  a.abnad.net
127.0.0.1  b.abnad.net
127.0.0.1  c.abnad.net #[IE-SpyAd]
127.0.0.1  d.abnad.net
127.0.0.1  e.abnad.net
127.0.0.1  m3.abnad.net
127.0.0.1  gtcc1.acecounter.com
127.0.0.1  gtp1.acecounter.com
127.0.0.1  acestats.com
127.0.0.1  www.acestats.com
127.0.0.1  ads.active.com
127.0.0.1  www.activesearch.com #[Adware.ActiveSearch]
127.0.0.1  actualnames.com #[Parasite.ActualNames][Spyware.ActualNames]
127.0.0.1  www.actualnames.com
127.0.0.1  ad-up.com
127.0.0.1  www.ad-up.com
127.0.0.1  adbest.com #[IE-SpyAd]
127.0.0.1  ad.adbest.com
(snip)

[W1RKW]

OK, Got it.  I forgot that MVPS has the host file on their website for people to use.  Glad I don't have to try to create my own.  Thanks.

[k4kyv]

OK, Got it.  I forgot that MVPS has the host file on their website for people to use.  Glad I don't have to try to create my own.  Thanks.

Check out this link for further explanation of how the HOSTS file works:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1838144,00.asp

I  have mine set up so I can toggle it off by temporarily renaming the file NOHOSTS.  Every now and again, a site I want to pull up is listed and therefore blocked.  I simply click on the icon, and HOSTS is disabled, until I finish, and then I click on the icon again and it is  reactivated.  It is convenient to toggle it off when there is a problem accessing a website.  If that is the cause, that tells me there is something questionable about the website, otherwise why was it listed?

The HOSTS file has been more effective in keeping my computer clean than all my anti-adware and anti-virus software combined (but I still keep them enabled), along with a software firewall.

Maybe I should knock on wood, but in the 8 years or so that I have had access to the internet, I have never knowingly had my computer infected with a virus.  Adware, yes, but never a virus or trojan.

[W1RKW]

Maybe I should knock on wood, but in the 8 years or so that I have had access to the internet, I have never knowingly had my computer infected with a virus.  Adware, yes, but never a virus or trojan.

The same for me too.  In fact, I've run anti-virus software only when I've suspected that there might be something wrong with my machine but each time the scan would came up negative. I'd install the antivirus software  and when I determined that it was clean I'd remove it. I've only have had to do this handful of times over the last 10 years. Essentially I've been running naked for years.  I'm diligent about screening everything that comes into the house before it lands on my computers and it seems to work for me.  Not having antivirus software allows my machines to run at optimum.  I've never seen a need for it and still don't but that's just me.

By the way, instaledl the hosts file from MVPS.org and visited some of the sites I normally visit.  They load much faster and have eliminated the annoying banner ads and pop-ups.  Thanks for the tip.

[W3SLK]

Since we are on the subject of SPAM, I noticed in my spam trap that there has been a signifcant increase in the amount of spam I have been bombarded with. Mind you, it doesn't get to my CPU, but is trapped by the ISP, (Earthlink). I have the choice of stating whether it is actual spam or a legit message. Lately though, there has been quite a load of "dreaming obnoxious" style spam messages. Anyone have a clue?