Re: Spam wars (was test)

"Chris Rockcliffe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote

> Jacey Bedford30/11/03 5:42 AM

> > My e-mail has gone up from 100 per day to 600 per
> > day in a matter of a couple of months. All the extra is pure spam.
>
> You're not alone Jacey. My spam has also increased by approx the same
amount
> in that time.  I think all the newsgroups are being harvested repeatedly.

I don't have the same volume of emails but the number of spam mails has
increased signifcantly. I'd estimate around 1 in 30 of my emails are
genuine.

I don't think it's the newsgroups. The (genuine) address I use for the
newsgroups these days has had little spam. It seems, at least in my case,
that use of services, e.g. sometime you need to give an email address for a
software download, I use Paltalk, etc. are the most likely culprits. I guess
it would only take one apparently genuine site to pass on email addresses
and you have got problems. I never use the address I use here for that
purpose.

> > Please note - anyone trying to contact me privately (and I do try to
> > always include an address in the sig) please put something obvious in
> > the header. I have to delete wholesale and anything that says Hi or Hey
> > in the header gets deleted unread. My filters automatically chuck out
> > anything with suspect words or phrases such as 'enlarge' 'teens' and
> > 'meds.'

I don't filter that way. I have been using SpamPal which uses blacklists to
do my filtering. The way I have it set, it tags anything suspect with [Spam]
and I use the OE filtering to move this stuff into it's own folder where I
give it a quick review once in a while in case something genuine has got
there in error before doing a block delete.

The ISP I use for my web hosting is currently working on a similar system,
again using the lists. emails that come through to me on email accounts
connected with my sites are currently marked as low priority - something
again I can set rules for.

In both cases, I'd say at least in excess of 90% of spam is marked
correctly. Cases of genuine email getting wrongly tagged have proved to be
rare - say less that 1%.

Jon