[VoIP] OT- Spam

[Greg Blakely]

If you're using Outlook, you can use SpamBayes, available at
spambayes.sourceforge.net.

Mine catches about 80% of my spam, and is able to learn what I consider
spam vs what I consider to be "ham."

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: voip-bounces at ckts.info [mailto:voip-bounces at ckts.info] 
> On Behalf Of David Josephson
> Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 6:36 PM
> To: Jayson Smith; Voice Over IP Tandem for Analog Switches
> Subject: Re: [VoIP] OT- Spam
> 
> Jayson Smith wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> >      I am getting fed up with spam. A few weeks ago, I 
> apparently got 
> > added to somebody's mailing list. All of a sudden, I 
> started getting 
> > many, many
> <snip>
> 
> A lot of questions there, but we've all been there, so you'll 
> get sympathy. I have been posting stuff on the internet for 
> more than ten years, so I'm on a lot of spam lists -- I  get 
> about 1,000 a day, most of which are dropped at my server.
> 
> To answer the last question first, no, there isn't any way to 
> get back to the spammers. It's counterproductive to send them 
> anything, because all you do is confirm that they have 
> reached you, which means your address is now verified and 
> therefore worth more.
> 
> The easiest spam filters are built in to email programs like 
> Thunderbird. Most of these support blacklisting, 
> whitelisting, pattern matches and all sorts of variants. You 
> have to spend some time training the program. The inherent 
> problem with this approach is that you still have to download 
> the whole message from the server if you want the filter to read it.
> 
> The best filters run on your mail server, and filter your 
> mail before it ever gets to your inbox. All of the various 
> methods you described can be applied, but you need your own 
> server. I use "SpamBouncer" 
> (www.spambouncer.org) which was written by Catherine Hampton, 
> who seems to have stopped working on it about a year ago, but 
> it works fine. It is very processing-intensive and can slow a 
> server down if you get a lot of mail. It uses a weighted 
> average according to how spammy it thinks a message is, and 
> is very smart about how it works. Another popular alternative 
> of the same sort but written in perl, is SpamAssassin. I will 
> probably switch to SpamAssassin if SpamBouncer continues 
> without updates for much longer. The fellow who runs the 
> first ISP I used, rahul.net, uses SpamAssassin.
> 
> Spamcop and other blacklists are useful against a certain 
> type of spammer, but not against all, especially not against 
> spambot sources which come from random hijacked machines.
> 
> There are SpamAssassin-type filters that go into your mailbox 
> and read your mail, and delete or move messages into spam 
> folders. They can run on the same machine where you read your 
> mail or on another machine anywhere -- the mail server 
> doesn't know the difference between these programs moving 
> your mail around and you doing it yourself. Some of my 
> friends use Spamihilator http://www.spamihilator.com which is 
> one of these and seems to work OK, and is free.
> 
> Having a bunch of different email addresses doesn't help 
> anymore, you just get more spam. For a while I kept a list of 
> about 50 and could figure out where the spammers had gotten 
> my name from. Then I realized it didn't matter, the solution 
> was the same anyway, and now I got multiple copies of each 
> spam, addressed to different accounts.
> 
> There is another nasty approach that some of my friends use. 
> Some other, mutual, friends refuse to email the friends who 
> use this software, so beware. This is also software that runs 
> on the mail server, and it only allows mail from people on 
> your whitelist. You can add names to your whitelist, and it 
> automatically bounces a mail back to the sender if the sender 
> isn't on the whitelist. The bounce mail has a simple 
> click-to-confirm response so a human can manually add him or 
> herself to your whitelist and get the message through in a 
> few minutes, but a lot of people are wary of clicking any 
> links in emails. You can read all about this at http://tmda.net
> 
> Cheers
> 
> David Josephson
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