Life of a Webmaster (cont)
This week I got an email from a reader who had changed their email address and wanted everybody in their address book to know. Nothing strange in this, I get them all the time when friends leave jobs. The difference with this mail was that the reader (David) wasn't leaving his job or going travelling. He was just sick to death of the spam he received every day.
Whereas normally I simply file these away for future attention, I read through this one. David had taken time not only to discuss why he was changing address but also offered some advice on how to avoid having to make the same sacrifice. Over the next few days I will pass on this advice, as well as some of my own. I too am getting to the point where I may have to change my email address in order to keep my sanity. Hopefully, between us, David and I can save some of you guys the same fate.
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My Email has some pattern to it. I have begun moving things out of the inbasket to folders based upon rules. The rules are looking for senders names that I know or To: Addresses ( mailing lists) which I know I do not receive spam from. I now read my folders first. The rest of the mail is then quicker to review, read and delete. Mostly delete.
I am using "MailWatcher" which checks my accounts prior to download full messages, then I can delete, place sender to spam list and it also suggest me spammer as it connects to spamguard and other services you may add.
sometimes it tells you that a friend's company is a spammer cause the antispam company classified it wrongly (same as Jake 's website in a way..) but it generally trim 80 % of the 50 average spams I receive daily.
Jake, I found a couple of websites that help, at least where spambots are concerned.
The first one:
{Link}
encodes your email address so the spambot doesn't pick up the pattern. I've even started adding the mailto: to the encoding on sites I've worked on.
The second is an interesting article on protecting your email address on websites, some of it is hokey but interesting:
{Link}
-Lance
Internally we use a span filter which works well. Personally I have a registered domain that provides 50 free email forwarding addresses. I use these to setup a few fake names that forward to my primary address and use these when registering at sites for information. Tracking the span that comes in I have noticed that a few of the "professional" sites I have registered at must sell the list to spammers because their message said I am getting this because I said OK at another site, however they do allow you to opt out of future mailings. Others names I have used that simply get to spam mail I end up removeing from my forwarding list, I do this about twice a year. I find this much easier than changing my email address. I funny thing about this is trying to explain it to a non-techie, they look at you like you have a third horn growing out of your head.
I have three e-mail addresses, one for work, one at home and one for something I volunteer to do. I have noticed there is definately a pattern in where the spam goes. My work address receives no spam however I almost never give this address out on a web site. The volunteer e-mail address is on Hotmail so it does get some spam but it is on about the one spam a day level. My home e-mail address which I used a lot of web sites gets about 100 spam a day and is to the point I am ready to give it up and tell only the people I want sending me e-mail what it is.
So in a nutshell only tell people you trust what your e-mail is and get something like a Hotmail account to use for websites that want you to register and your spam should be about zero.
Cory.
I did the famous multi email scheme. One email for real stuff and the other for junk email. My real email address is an email account that I have through my ISP, my fake email is just a simple Hotmail account. The only problem is that just the opposite has happened where I get more junk email in my ISP account rather than my Hotmail. Hotmail has this nifty block function that you can either block an entire email address such as wicked_spammer@idiotspammers.com or you can block all emails that have the same domain such as all emails with @idiotspammers.com. I have both of these options turned on and it usually gets about 90% of the spam.
The best tip I got against spam was from you Jake, I registered a domain name, and every time a web site ask me for my email I enter:
nameofthewebsite@mydomain.com
And the catchall alias does it all...
Very usefull to track down web site that sold your email.
I thought it might help some of those poor websites out there we keep maligning to point out that, even if a website seems to have sold your addy, they might not have. If you gave them an address, they may have included it in an HTML form, perhaps 'hidden' that was crawled by a bot... like google, which would make your email addy more available to spammers.
So, it's possibly an error of omission rather than a crime of comission.
I have used this method for years to limit spam and it has worked for me. I have three email addresses. The first is my business address. Only business contacts get that one. No spam in that account in the 2.5 years it has been active. The second is the address I get from my ISP. This one I only give to family and friends. No spam in the three years it has been active. The third is a free excite account that I use for testing when setting up new Domino servers or basic troubleshooting. This is the address that I use every time I am required to provide an address to anyone but business contacts or family and friends. This is also the one that gets the spam. I just go in about once a month and clear it out.
For a company using Domino however, I have come to the conclusion that the DNSBL on Domino is just insufficient. We have recently resorted to an email proxy for filtering for Viruses and Spam(Not form me but for other employees who are receiving too much spam).
We are using Spam Assassin(free)
{Link}
Another great product is Postini.(used by my ISP)
{Link}
The bottom line is that these two products do a great job of preventing spam from ever reaching your in-box and that is the ultimate goal for us!
Wow gaston, that's a great tip!
What's worked well for me so far is K-Spam, free in the OpenNTF.org downloads. Okay, you need to be running your own server, but after about 3-4 months, it's trained well enough to knock out more than 90%, maybe as much as 98% or so. What it lacks though, and I still need to add, is a whitelist, since I still have to glance through the unread view of the spam box looking for friend's mail that it catches erroneously.
Another free bayesian filter that works well for standard Pop3 accounts is popfile, available at sourceforge.
KSpam has made life much less chaotic, and still seems to get better as it trains itself over time. After the initial install I was a bit discouraged, but I learned not to be as time passed and it got much better.
Spam is out of control for my email address - probably 100+ a day - think I will go back to using a pen and paper - ah postman just arrived - ah shucks - spam there as well!
Another useless fact.. you are only supposed to use SPAM, not spam which is trademark!
... or is it the other way round?
Looking at the SPAM website {Link} I would think it's the capitalised version that should be avoided.
..of course. No doubt SPAM is an acronym but I *really* don't want to know what for.
AFAIK: SPAM gets its name from what it is: SPiced hAM.
And I thought it was :
Sawdust Packaged As Meat
More useless facts: It was Monty Python that made it famous. Spam is named from the classic sketch in which a woman is badgered to order spam items from a menu so much, she finally screams out, "but I don't want spam!!!"
Most ISPs let each account have up to six email addresses nowadays. I have three that I use. One for work, one for personal, and one for web registrations that gets spam that I don't care about.
I have a folder called "registrations". When I sign up for something, I use the registration email (and ALWAYS check for the little checkbox not to be signed up). I usually only have to wait about two minutes, and then my new username and password gets sent to my email. After that, I move it to my 'registrations' folder, and my account info is all in one place should I ever need it again.
After that, I don't care how much spam gets sent to the account.