worm, virus, spam filters?

[tomneal]

Recently I have had a huge increase in Spam.

I suspect it is because I am a contact person on a couple of web sites.

I have been on a tear for the last couple of weeks trying to filter out all the key words and bad senders.

The filtering seems to be working.


Today I realized that I haven't been getting hit with contaminated emails like I was a year ago. Did something happen on the internet to filter those out? Or am I just lucky?


I use MS Outlook Express


One of the tricks I have been trying is to "Block Senderr" on every spam message. Then I go to the blocked sender page and remove the user and leave the web site. It works on most of them because they say they are from companys I never heard of.

[Liberty]

Virus and such tend to come in cycles. Most providers tend to be pretty good at stopping them these days. Although they should let you know if they actually block one. Because users and providers are a little smarter than we used to be viri tend not to spread as rappant as it use to be. Prosecuting a few of of the virus authers has help keep it down also,

Outlook Express is pretty terrible at blocking Spam, You might look into using something like Thunderbird. which is free, and does a fair job at learning SPam and blocking it.

[cyphur]

Quickest way to filter out that stuff is to use a web-based email(unless you have a company POP server). Their filters are honed by millions of users per day so they stay quite current. I use Yahoo and Gmail.

Another option is to create rules to govern how Outlook handles the emails. I personally use Novell GroupeWise at work, and can create rules so that any email coming from an address not on list Z, it goes to a different folder.

OR, you can create a script for folks on those websites to have those emails come from specific website related email addresses, and then have them fill out info, and then the website sends you the email. Return emaill address would be part of the form. Then, you create folders for the sites' email address.


May seem complicated but its not. If you need more help let me know.


Edit - had to step away from desk and Liberty posted up before I finished. +1 to the Thunderbird idea. If my employer didn't use Novell, I'd be running Thunderbird. I hate Microsoft.

[seamusTX]

For e-mail, I use a program called MailWasher Pro (http://www.firetrust.com/). It uses online spam databases and detects most spam automatically. You can set it up to show you the subject line and sender so that you don't accidentally delete legitimate e-mail.

MailWasher does not detect viruses as such, but you can tell when you get an attachment from someone you don't know that it is likely a virus.

I also use McAfee antivirus. It has detected maybe one virus in five years, sent by the infected PC of someone I know.

Blocking by sender does little good because the senders are almost always false. You might also block legitimate e-mail. Some Russian spammer uses one of my addresses to send tons of spams. I get bounce messages because of it.

Spam goes up and down. Some days I get 100 and other days only a few. Your ISP probably has spam filters, and they will work more or less efficiently as spammers discover ways to get around them.

There are techniques for encoding e-mail addresses on web sites so that spammers have trouble harvesting them. See http://www.natata.com/.

- Jim

[Mithras61]

Personally, I like Qurb (http://www.qurb.com/) for spam filtering. It trains based on who's in your address book and based on any folder setup you may already have to determine who is legit and who isn't. You get a separate folder that generates a pop-up window that allows you to examine the subject line and sender information a few times each day (or whenever you check your email) and you simply select the check box beside the ones you want to mark as not spam.

You can also set a threshold that says "mark all emails with a X% probablility of being spam as spam" and the pop-up window greys those out (you can still select them as "not spam" but after a few days you get used to the idea of it being pretty accurate and just glance at 'em).

I use an offline maile reader that works with Qurb to check five separate accounts, and may get as many as several hundred spam each day. Qurb pretty much makes it all manageable (yes, I know Yahoo & gmail have spam filters, but I like to keep emails as a record, and offline reading makes it easier).