Too Much Spam!

[KeepsakeGirl]

Recently i've been OVERWHELMED w/the amount of Spam hitting my yahoo inbox. I have the filters set..i get about 300 daily that are "caught" and I another 50 that hit my inbox anyway. What gives?!!! How can I make it stop or do I need to dump this account of 10 yrs and start over?

[blonboy]

ooh..... I'd say start over..... maybe go with gmail or something.

The spam in my personal email at home was so bad I had to take drastic action and have people 'respond' or reply to an automated email. Essentially, the first time you send me mail - you get a reply that says "please verify you are human, and click here" or something....... If the link gets clicked or responded to - you get added to the "white list" and never see that message again........ Now, 99% of the email that hits my Inbox is ONLY from people I want to get email from.

[Dobick]

My email provider uses a spam filter called postini. It is absolutely the most accurate spam filter I have ever encountered. It outright filters all email that is blatant spam, and I never see it, and those messages that are borderline spam get sent to a quarantine. Once a day I receive a quarantine summary. I have been using it for 5 months now, and I have had maybe 10 messages that I wanted that got quarantined, and I have only had 2 messages that were spam get through -- 2 messages in 5 months. I used to get over 150 spam messages a day.

The bad news though, is that I do not believe that this would be available to yahoo, or gmail, or hotmail addresses, but if you set up your own domain, you would then be able to forward your yahoo email to your own domain email address.

[brad]

350 messages a day?

I wish.

1000-1500 a day here, of which 90% is Spam. If it weren't for popfile, I'd be up a creek.

Sorry.. don't mean to seem like I'm laughing at your pain, I'm not. Spam is kinda like the weather.. you can rant and rave all you want about it, you can even move to avoid it for the moment... but in the end, it will always be there and will almost always cause you grief from time to time.

[Daniel Bates]

I'm sitting pretty at 30-40 per day... usually. GMail helps, I suppose...


It goes in waves though. A while back I was getting hundreds a day, now it's just dozens. Maybe the mailing lists get refreshed once in a while?

[Steelsun]

Gmail (which I use for most of my personal & photobiz email) catches 99.9% of the spam, and I am happy because that's about 400+ emails a day.

And blog comment spam- yuk. My main blog gets easily 300 a day - thank the gods for Askimet to catch that.
Since I put age verification on my forum (shoothouston) that has caught about 95% of the spam robots that try to register and post.

[gardener]

Odd as it may sound, I'm still using an old Hotmail account and I get like... 2 spams a week. Of course, there probably aren't 10 people in the whole world that have the address but still, not a bad deal at all.

[jamiewallace]

I just moved my mail over to gmail for domains. I keep the same address, less spam, all free. You have to be able to manage your own domain name, and have a little technical knowledge, but it's pretty simple all in all.

[JamesB]

good idea to start with a fresh email address and keep it under lock and key and DO NOT:
DO NOT display it on your web site
DO NOT display it on ANY message board, blog or any other place on the web
DO NOT give it to people who are insistent on sending you jokes and "feel good" story emails and chain letters, this is one way your email address is collected for spamming purposes.
if they must send them to you, create one just for jokes and only give them that email address and not your real one.

DO use mail forwarders or aliases to hide your true email address.

Again keep your email address closely guarded. I only get a few spam emails these days

James

[prncfarquad]

Even though it is a virus factory, for work I use outlook and made a rule that if you are not in my contacts you go to junk. I filter through the junk box once a week or so and see if I missed anyone. I also have the same email name repeated in yahoo.com (friends and family), hotmail.com (used when purchasing online), and gmail.com just because :)

[ggmex4wd5sp]

I agree with James. Another way to get plenty of spam is to "click here to stop getting this email" Many spammers send email to "every possible combination of letters" @ common ISP. You requesting to be removed just verified your address as vaild. Valid email addresses have value to other spammers. You address just got sold to thousands of spammers.

Protect your email address. Never reply to spam in any way.

I use Yahoo and only one or two spams get through their tests a day. Not bad. I sometimes catch valid stuff being filtered so before I dump the spam folder I do a quick scan.

dan

[brad]

Originally Posted by Steelsun

And blog comment spam- yuk. My main blog gets easily 300 a day

Yuk.. and message boards... I admin a half dozen different message boards and it is a constant struggle to keep them clean.

I did modify the code on most of them so it times how long they were on the "new post" screen... if its less than 1 second, it throws away the post. (Most bots just dump straight to the "Post Message" part, skipping the page where you compose the message, so the time spent on the composition screen is 0 seconds.)

[Cerbera LM]

Only email from my contacts make it into my hotmail inbox the rest go to the junk mail folder. Once a day weed thru the 50-70 junk emails by scanning the from column. Get junk mail on my isp email even through I've never used it for anything.

[Pikachu]

Originally Posted by JamesB

good idea to start with a fresh email address and keep it under lock and key and DO NOT:
DO NOT display it on your web site
DO NOT display it on ANY message board, blog or any other place on the web
DO NOT give it to people who are insistent on sending you jokes and "feel good" story emails and chain letters, this is one way your email address is collected for spamming purposes.
if they must send them to you, create one just for jokes and only give them that email address and not your real one.

DO use mail forwarders or aliases to hide your true email address.

Again keep your email address closely guarded. I only get a few spam emails these days

James

And to go one step further, dont use the

mailto:address@domain.com

link to send email from a web page. Spambots read those easily and snag the address. Use a php form with image verification instead.

[KeepsakeGirl]

So at this point...am i basically screwed and stuck w/ this?