Spam - have you ever managed to stop it?

i get the odd one about cheap "0EM" software but apart from that, nothing.
although i have started to get blank emails containing PDFs of what should be in the email :(

edit: thats on my own mail server (@blighter.net), my 8 year old hotmail account gets in the region of 5-25 a day
 
Got 3 underscores in my hotmail address, thats stopped me getting any spam in the past 5 years.
 
I get about 6000 e-mails a month on my BT account - however their spam software has caught 99.9% of them.

I get 10 a day slip through on my main account, 3 or 4 a week on my hotmail and none on my work address. I get so many on gmail I've stopped using it.
 
The thing about spam is that in my experience it seems a bit random which accounts get targetted.

When I was with Nildram, I used to get around 50 spam msgs a day. My email address wasn't a dictionary word, but I think I may have worked out where they harvested all the addresses from. In the early days of ADSL, Nildram used to assign all users a static IP with a DNS name of username.gotadsl.co.uk. So what I reckon spammers did was do a reverse DNS lookup on the whole IP range registered by Nilly and then get the usernames (and hence default email addresses) from that. I was pretty careful with that email address and didn't make it publically available in many places at all. Unlike softhome/hotmail accounts I used all over the place which got hardly any spam :confused:

Since moving house I've been with NTL and Sky, and I get maybe 1 spam mail a month if that. Looking in Outlook my Junk Mail folder is empty since I installed Windows about 6 weeks ago, in the old days of Nildram it would fill up overy time I opened Outlook!

The main problem I had when I was getting 1000+ a month was that I had to set filters so aggressively that sometimes legitimate mails would get filtered :(

Edit: I'm wondering if one day the traditional SMTP style of emails will get replaced by some kind of thing integrated into IM clients... i.e. instant messaging but expanded out to have full email style functionality with offline support.
 
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I use Thunderbird, and that catches nearly all of it, but I barely get any in the first place...

I've heard that you can salvage an account like that by setting up a gmail account and forwarding everything from the junked account to it, then just checking the gmail account instead.
 
I use 3 web based accounts each of which are very good at catching out spam. The spam that I do get I usually have been responsible for signing myself up in the past..
 
blighter said:
although i have started to get blank emails containing PDFs of what should be in the email
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Just the latest trick in an ever-ongoing attempt to get past spam catching filters.

I get loads on my main account and the one I give out here, but none on the one I use for commercial sign-ups. It's all down to the name you choose - [email protected] is pretty much guaranteed to get spammed to death (guess what I use here) but if you keep it relatively obscure then you stand a better chance of staying spam-free.

Either way though, very little gets through my three layers of spam protection. :)
 
You mean eating it, or posting it?

Heart attack will take care of the former, if you're addicted to the latter just request a voluntary suspension from a mod.

Sorry, I'll get my coat now... :p
 
I don't receive any spam, I'm too alpha.


Seriously though, I have tonnes. It started flooding in after I a rather bad situation regarding a friend and his then girlfriend. He most likely signed me up to all sorts of crap to try to make my e-life hell. Thankfully it all gets filtered out. Makes for some interesting reading though sometimes :D
 
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Never get any spam anymore, Gmail catches everything. It's so good that I just forward all my other email addresses to my Gmail account now and let it handle everything.

Edit: that is, I never get any spam in my inbox—I actually receive a metric crapton of spam, it's just Google catches it all.
 
I use my isp's webmail filter, it filters about 60-80% of the spam, still a lot comes through.

One of my isp's accounts is just spammed beyond repair, dad did that, his 2nd accoutn he;s using now also like 20 spam's a day, I won't give him a 3rd, he still hasn't learned his lesson about giving his email to a lot of pron sites :( .
Also gives his true mailbox email, not an alias that can be removed :mad: .
Rly my dad will never learn.

Mum's gmail seems clean :) .
 
Most of my spam seems to originate from when I used my mail email address to signup with a Yahoo! Group :o

I'm not sure I ever made a posting though!
 
Berserker said:
Just the latest trick in an ever-ongoing attempt to get past spam catching filters.

I get loads on my main account and the one I give out here, but none on the one I use for commercial sign-ups. It's all down to the name you choose - [email protected] is pretty much guaranteed to get spammed to death (guess what I use here) but if you keep it relatively obscure then you stand a better chance of staying spam-free.

Either way though, very little gets through my three layers of spam protection. :)
Click to expand...


Also having your email address in your signature on public forums is a guaranteed way to get more spam delivered.

Our work email was getting deluged with spam mail to the point where it was crashing our mail server as it tried to deal with it all.

We switched to an external filtering system from Email systems and quickly realised why our mail server was struggling so much:

emailsystemsqq9.png


We are averaging about 8,000 spam a day (89%).
 
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