Dealing With Spam

[John Simkin]

I am currently receiving 3,000 emails a day. Earlier this week I signed up with Spam Arrest (its free). I am impressed. It really works.

With Spam Arrest, you can continue to use your current email program (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora) or use our webmail system to access your email from anywhere. You configure who is allowed to send you email by importing your address books or entering their email addresses directly into the system. Emails from unknown senders will receive an auto-reply message, containing a challenge. If the sender completes the challenge, their email is moved to your inbox, and they are added to your authorized sender list. The challenge is easy for people, but impossible for automated systems to complete.

http://spamarrest.com/

Please let me know if you have come up with a better solution.

[Graham Davies]

I have been using MailWasher Pro for around two years. It filters most of the spam automatically - i.e. so that I don't even see it - mainly by referring to realtime blackhole lists, but I can also set up my own "friends" and "foes" filters and other specific filters in addition to these. MailWasher Pro filters incoming mail from my three ISPs simultaneously - two of which I access via Eudora and one via CompuServe Classic.

The three different ISPs that I use have their own filtering systems that stop spam before it hits my mailboxes. CompuServe appears to be quite efficient: only half a dozen spams per day get through to my CompuServe mailbox. Force 9, my second ISP, seems to block all spam: since using Force9 I have had zero spam hit my Force9 mailbox over a period of two years. Netalia, my third ISP, lets around 30-50 spams through each day, but it blocks all known viruses. Netalia was, however, unable to stop the spam hijack that hit me in July this year, when my Netalia address was spoofed as the return address of several different spam companies. However, the storm of bounces arising from the hijack was shortlived, lasting only 3-4 months. I am back to my normal quota of 30-50 spams per day arriving via my Netalia mailbox, and MailWasher Pro zaps most of these automatically. Essentially, I don't regard spam as a problem anymore.