Comments on: The Sorry State of Spam and What You Can Do About It

By: Jay Burnes

Jay Burnes — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:49:29 +0000

a friend of mine made the mistake of signing up for boxbe. Now I receive daily requests, that try hard to appear to come from her, asking me to sign up for their service. She hates them but has been unable to unsubscribe. I have been unable to block them with spamassassin. Be carefull what you subscribe to, a spam blocker can easily be a spammer.

Jay

By: John Sampson

John Sampson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:38:48 +0000

Apparently spammers synthesise email addresses at random so sooner or later the spam will start coming even if your email address was not harvested from anywhere. I use ClearMyMail which filters email before it reaches my computer. So far it is the best solution for me as annoyingly Thunderbird sounds a ping on arrival of email whether it is spam or not. A good spam-filtering email client would be a good idea if it remained silent when spam arrived but pinged when ‘ham’ arrived. I don’t know of one that does that.

By: How to Deal With Low-Quality Messages

How to Deal With Low-Quality Messages — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:01:59 +0000

[...] April 27th, 2009 (9:00am) Celine Roque No Comments Around 94% of all email is classified as spam. In 2005, Americans threw away around 5.8 million tons of junk mail. Fortunately, we can take steps to avoid both junk mail and spam email. [...]

By: Noel

Noel — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:50:37 +0000

Oops, the coupon is: emailias1

By: Noel

Noel — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:49:51 +0000

I have been using Emailias.com’s disposable email addresses (DEA)for almost 4 years now; I rarely get more than 1 spam message a month (Through using Emailias / not leaving my email address ‘lying around’ for spambots to pick up / other sensible measures that most experienced ppl take these days).

It’s the most highly-featured DEA service I have found – beats SpamGourmet, Trashmail and the like.

Challenge/Response and Bayesian filtering don’t pass muster with me.

Using a contact form service like that of AwayFind.com will probably be another tool for me to keep spam down / control contact.

P.S. Here’s a coupon for Emailias – It get you over 80% off the first year’s fee ($3) – yup . . . it’s a paid-for service.

If we’re going in for this full disclosure thing, then redemption of the coupon will get me the equivalent amount/value off my next renewal.

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive Reducing Unnecessary Email Intake «

WebWorkerDaily » Archive Reducing Unnecessary Email Intake « — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:00:09 +0000

[...] email spam since we use email as our primary communication tool. WWD Editor Judi Sohn has written an extensive guide on how to reduce incoming email spam. In that article, she discusses spam filtering for web based email, as well as server-side and [...]

By: Web Worker Daily » Archive More Ways to Fight the Spam Plague «

Web Worker Daily » Archive More Ways to Fight the Spam Plague « — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:42 +0000

[...] 23rd, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean No Comments Last year, Judi Sohn did an excellent roundup of anti-spam solutions, breaking them down by web-based, client-side and server-side solutions. As she noted there, [...]

By: Ledokin » The Sorry State of Spam and What You Can Do About It

Ledokin » The Sorry State of Spam and What You Can Do About It — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:00:56 +0000

[...] read more | digg story [...]

By: Chris Boswell

Chris Boswell — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:52:45 +0000

I find using the verification system very useful, and its reduced spam to almost zero. I also forward my mail to another box where its backed up, and this isn’t verified, so I don’t lose any emails. Checking this box too might seem like too much work, but actually, once the system had been running a while a found I was not getting spam in either box.

By: Free Email Cards

Free Email Cards — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 04:11:34 +0000

Glad to see someone is staying on top of things.

By: Joshua Kaufman

Joshua Kaufman — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:03:00 +0000

I use SpamSieve for Mac and have no complaints. It's worked very effectively for me over the past several months.

By: Randy Stewart

Randy Stewart — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:31:37 +0000

Disclosure – I’m a product manager for Boxbe.com, which is a market based solution to unwanted email

Most technical solutions to email spam are really just escalating the ongoing war with spam and the people who send it.

Community filters are only as good as the community. I routinely receive false positives in my Yahoo! Mail spam filter.

Other filters need to be both trained initially and on an ongoing basis to keep up with the arms race that is the war on spam.

You mentioned challenge response as a solution that works (if not ideal), but it doesn’t take much imagination to envision offshore captcha test takers depending on it’s success.

Boxbe takes a different approach to looking at spam as a subset of unwanted email, which for me is at least as big a problem as spam. Boxbe lets it’s users put a price tag on their attention. Our service is free to use and we take a small percentage of the proceeds users receive.

We started as an email forwarding service, but we are rolling out new features like integration with existing Gmail addresses.

We do use challenge response as one mechanism for filtering email and I understand that this does put the onus on the sender to respond, it does so only initially. It’s up to the recipient to approve them for future emails.

I’d be happy to answer any questions about Boxbe that any of you might have. I run our blog here and can be reached via email at randy@boxbe.com.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:38:11 +0000

You forgot about third-party filtering services such as Katharion. I’ve been using them for the past few months and am down from 80-90 spam/day to less than 1. Basically, you change your MX records so that all of your mail is delivered to Katharion. They then filter this mail and forward it on to your normal mail server. Brilliant. Costs a few bucks /user/month.

By: Logical Extremes

Logical Extremes — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:06:03 +0000

I’ll second the hesistation about using challenge-response or other white-list approaches to email. Personally, I have no tolerance for not geting legitimate email, but I find it philosphically repugnant to put the burden on the sender.

By: Jodi Gaines

Jodi Gaines — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:19:36 +0000

We created (and use) a web-based software IFM eMail Manager to help address this issue for us and our customers. It utilizes SpamAssassin and Rules Management to put Junk mail in folders for review or they can be deleted all together. Since using this, the amount of spam I receive has decreased tremendously. We recently posted a blog about this very thing: Spam and Email Management - An Oxymoron?

By: COD

COD — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:02:34 +0000

I forward all my domain mail to Gmail, then forward the filtered mail back to a double secret IMAP box on my server. I catch 98% of the spam that way – good enough considering the price!