Computer Related > How do I reduce the amount of spam I receive? Miscellaneous
Thread Author: Duncan Replies: 6

 How do I reduce the amount of spam I receive? - Duncan
I get around 8-10 spam emails a day on average. The two main spammers are formientical dot com and egaticulates dot com.

My mail provider is Yahoo and they have a pretty efficient spam filter, I have this set to hold suspected spam in the spam box, which is then deteted after seven days.

Is there anything I can do to stop these two organisations sending me spam?
Last edited by: VxFan on Sun 4 Apr 10 at 11:57
 Spam - VxFan
>> Is there anything I can do to stop these two organisations sending me spam?

Firstly don't reply to their emails, that just confirms you have a valid email address and you'll get bombarded with more.

Apart from setting up filters with a rule saying something like "if mail from abc 'at' def.ghi is sent to me then delete it" I don't think there's much else you can do.
 Spam - smokie
What mail client are you using, if any? Outlook and Outlook Express (and no doubt many others) have black listing, whereby you can say that any mail from specific addresses is rejected (and whitelisting, whereby only mail from approved addresses is allowed in).
 Spam - Roger.
I use Gmail and rarely if ever, get spam.
I use Gmail's pop & smtp servers to send & receive mail from Outlook on the new laptop and Thunderbird on the older one.
I rarely use Gmail as Web Mail, but it's handy on the odd occasion & it keeps all my emails "off home location" too.
 Spam - Crankcase
For what it's worth, my employer (a University) receives in the order of a hundred thousand emails a day at its border, of which approximately 95% is spam. It's a miracle so little actually gets through to users.

 How do I reduce the amount of spam I receive? - merlin
I used to lead a team developing a spam filter system. The best filters detect +99% of all spam with < 0.04% of non-spam (ham) incorrectly marked as spam.

Personally I don't use any spam filter but then I like to see the spam out of curiosity and to keep intouch with what spammers are doing.

The two domains you mention are linked with the same nameserver (NS1.ABORITERING.COM) so are almost certainly from the same source. Checking on uribl.com and www.spamhaus.org, these domains are not listed as found in spam. This surprised me and suggests that what you are receiving is not technically spam but unwanted ham (often confused with spam). I would need to see the mail you are receiving to confirm. Blocking based on the from address won't work for real spam as spammers use random from addresses. However if you get unwanted ham, then blocking using the from address should do the job.

To avoid spam I would use a throwaway email addresses (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_e-mail_address ) whenever I give an email address to anyone other than very close family & friends. If you give your real email address to websites then inevitably your address will get on spammers mailing lists sooner or later. Email addresses that I gave to the old site (no great surprise given their security), a national newspaper and a large car company have some how found their way onto the spammers' lists.

edited the link as the closed bracket at the end prevented it from working
Last edited by: VxFan on Mon 5 Apr 10 at 00:11
 How do I reduce the amount of spam I receive? - Duncan
Thank you for those responses.

The spam filter that Yahoo Mail provides is pretty good, it catches just about all the spam that is sent. I have the the spam filter set to hold the spam for seven days, this gives me the the time to check that there isn't any genuine mail in there and retrieve it.

The spam that I get - 15 when I logged on last night and another 9 this morning - is a minor irritation, but no more. It would be more work to set up new mail addresses, tell everybody my new address, remember to give companies a new disposable address, keep tabs on who had what etc etc!

I think for the time being I will stay with my "one address fits all" approach and consider changing when things get a bit more serious.
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