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Re: [OT] Verification required?

At 06:04p -0500 12/28/2003, Graff didst inscribe upon an electronic papyrus:

I simply use Mail.app and its junk filter.

I wrote my own spam filter in Perl. It runs on my ISP account, and deletes 99% of incoming spam. Spam accounts for about 90% of my incoming mail (measured in bytes; I'll eventually add real statistical reporting to my script. Since the spam is removed before downloading, my client app (Eudora) doesn't even see it.
I wrote it out of frustration, as I'm sure many programs are written. ;)

This works since I only get a dozen or so spam a day between my 3 e-mail accounts. I've had these addresses for about 5 years or so.

Why so low? I never give my real e-mail address to any business unless I am sure they won't resell it. I only give my e-mail addresses to people I have met personally (online is fine as long as it wasn't impersonal) and often.

That works for some people, and is an important general practice, but will be *far* from sufficient for many others, such as myself.

I never read any of the stupid e-cards that friends and family send to me, those sometimes serve as e-mail address collectors and visiting the web address for the e-card verifies your e-mail address.

Which of those card services have "re-used" your email address?
Or are you only guessing?

I would say that if you are getting more than a couple of dozen spam per day then cut your losses and get a new e-mail address.

Those of us with custom domain names cannot do that; there is no way to prevent spammers from making up addresses like sales@, info@, dev@, webmaster@, view@, and mangling addresses like webmaster@ into bmastgr@ or walter@ into er@, and random addresses like psufoiapsdy_czu@, etc.

Also, there is domain name spoofing such that spam appears to come from us, and bounces for those spams or viruses (due to made-up addresses) come back to us.

All of the junk mail services are merely stopgap measures. They have some amount of success at the expense of flexibility and they suffer from both false positives and false negatives.

Yeah, the trick is fine-tuning the threshholds. I set up my server-side filter to do both 'delete' and 'trash' so the 100%-sure spam gets destroyed and the not-so-sure messages go in the trash file so I can retrieve the occasional false positive (one or two a month [or more if I just screwed something up!]).

I have among the lowest volume of spam and I'm pretty sure its because I just don't take any risks with my e-mail addresses.

And because you don't have your own domain names.


-boo
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References: 
 >[OT] Verification required? (From: Christian Jon Anderson <email@hidden>)
 >Re: [OT] Verification required? (From: Graff <email@hidden>)



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