There are a number of good spam prevention solutions out there but unfortunately I couldn’t use any of them for a few of my accounts – many of them are for Outlook only at the moment and I prefer Eudora. Others require your ISP to sign up. But at last I found Mailwasher, which lets me check my POP3 email and “cleanse” it quickly and easily either by referring to one or more known spammer black lists (including ORDB and SpamCop) or by referring to rules I set up. I recently tested it against 96 spams and got two false positives (only listed as “possible” and “probable” spam) and three real spams let through. That’s good enough for me – especially as Mailwasher is free!
27 August 2002
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I use a filter and do get to toss much spam before it gets to me. My problem is that when I am in touch with this or that outfit they sell or give or steal my address and I get spam with my user name–this of course gets through the filter.
The answer, it seems, is to have one email account for personal mail and a second for all other things. But what a bother!
Comment by fred — 2 September 2002 @ 10:34 pm
I found a way to set Hotmail so that all email from sources I haven’t pre-approved gets treated as spam and thrown away after a week. I use that Hotmail account whenever I have to give an email address to a website I don’t trust. I wish I had done that a while ago, though – unfortunately in the early Internet days before Hotmail etc I had to use a real address and as a result I have two addresses that are heavily spam polluted which I still have to check in case someone sends me something interesting!
Comment by David Brake — 3 September 2002 @ 8:04 am
I am a Mac user, does anyone know of a spam blocker equivalent to Mailwasher for Macs?
Comment by michael — 3 September 2002 @ 10:21 am
I am a Mac user, does anyone know of a spam blocker equivalent to Mailwasher for Macs?
Comment by michael — 3 September 2002 @ 10:22 am
I use emailwash.com because they are far better than any other anti spam tool i have tried.
It works for any operating system and any mail-client.
Comment by Åge — 19 January 2004 @ 2:46 pm
I go a step farther than what Fred discusses above… I create unique email addresses for each new company/person I correspond with.
This way, if a certain address begins receiving spam, I know who compromised my address.
If I get even 1 spam with an email address, I generally LART the hell out of the spammer, then disable that email address, and inform the person or company that that email address is associated with that if they wish to continue correspondence, it’ll have to be via them calling or snail-mailing me, as I can’t trust them with my email addresses.
This is one small part of why I’ve reduced my monthly spam receival rate from over 2500/month at the beginning of this year to less than 10/month now (and still dropping).
Other parts include reporting spamvertised websites to their web hosts (including redirects), automated feedback form bogus data salting, and spamvertised website data draining.
Comment by SpamSlayer — 26 April 2004 @ 11:44 am