Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm not sure why you're still seeing this much spam. I receive several thousand spams a day. I use Spamhaus's RBL coupled with NJABL.org's RBL. That wipes out a good portion of them before they're even accepted. Then I use SpamAssassin. That appears to dump another huge hunk. In my inbox, I use SpamSieve (a Mac product), which correctly identifies the majority of the rest. As a result, I actually see about 50 to 100 spams a day which hit my 'probably spam' box and are quickly deleted after checking subjects. This isn't a great solution, but it works without any additional cost or effort on my part. If your ISP doesn't use good RBLs (some are over aggressive) and SpamAssassin, then you need another mail host.

You might also consider trying Mailblocks. You can retrieve your email from them after they've processed it. You can import your existing addressbook to whitelist common senders. I forward two old email accounts to a Mailblocks account. They receive about 500 to 1,000 spams a day which are never responded to, and thus keep aging out in the pending box.

The song
"Spam"
wasn't the origin of the term for the kind of email. But it's apropos:

"Spam in the place where I live (have some more) ...
Spam in the place where I work (you're obsessed) ...
Spam any place that you are (ham and pork) ..."

I just configured my mail servers to use Spamhaus's RBLs after spending the last two years trying to maintain my own REJECT list. My list worked great when spammers mostly didn't spoof, and it took me about 20 minutes a week and active user feedback to keep it working. However, with all the spoofed spam and spam coming from zombies and the like, the RBLs are indispensible. Right now, I get about 75 spam messages a day, most all from zombies that will be blacklisted soon enough. I don't rely on any client-side anti-spam filtering, instead using filters for things I know aren't spam (mailing lists, friends, family, etc.) and digging through the rest as needed.

I use two filters in combination (server- and client-based), which has reduced spam to a manageable level. At the moment I'm receiving about 10 unwanted emails from my ISP each day (it used to be several hundred), of which 90 % are immediately flagged as spam by Opera Mail. This number has held fairly steady even during the recent spam explosion.

The main advantage of the server-based approach is that I'm once again able to download mail via GPRS when I'm travelling. The main disadvantage is the possibility that an important email might be filtered out. After having used the filter for nine months I have yet to receive a complaint from someone who sent a mail and never got an answer, though (I list my phone numbers and home address on my web site, just to make sure...)

Of course, the risk of losing email is smaller for someone like me, corresponding in a small language (Norwegian in my case), than for you. Local spam is still very rare in Norway, and will probably never be a big problem, if for no other reason that it will always be fairly easy to find out who is doing the actual spamming.

Did you try to filter it? Thunderbird is pretty good, not perfect, but it takes the brunt of the attack.

I use Thunderbird when I'm on the road. I like its filter's integration into the client and the fact that it gives very few false positives. It's been slow learning to cut down on the false negs, though.

At home, I'm experimenting switching from PopFile, which I've liked but still gives me 1% false pos, and much higher than for false negs. I'm trying SpamBayes which has given me no false pos and is well integrated into OutLook (with only the occasional crash-to-black). I also run a script that trashes mail to evident.com that isn't to self or self++. (I'm beginning to ask friends to send to self++.) I also wrote a script that flags msgs from people in my contact list.

I've been afraid to auto-trash mail because I don't want to lose msgs I care about. So, I eyeball all msgs, which I can do pretty damn quickly. But, with the recent jump in spam, my eyeballs are missing msgs that matter. (Yes, I do hear from people with some regularity that I've screwed something up because I missed their email.) So, going to an auto-trasher might not do me any harm at this point.

"because I don't want to lose msgs I care about": you definitely have bad settings, then. The majority of the 1000s of spam I get each day are so obviously spam that they score like 15 or 20 in SpamAssassin. I have it set to pass through message that score 8 or fewer and to not mark messages that score 4 or fewer. About once a day I spot a message between 4 to 8 that I needed, sort of -- usually it's a mailing list I subscribe to that uses too many spam-like tags (like all CAPS).

Seriously, David, you need to pre-filter your email at one level (tolerate high false negatives) on the server so that you only download a fraction. If you're trying to filter locally, you're doomed.

I need help.I am useing outlook email,wins 2000,anytime that i am deleting spam my inbox will disappear too . what should i do.