Jimmy Johnson wrote:
> I seem to be getting a lot of spam since joining this group. Don't know if
> there is a connection. Anyone else getting spammed?
There probably is a connection. This mailing list is publicly archived
so, among other reasons, it can be crawled by search engines. Spambots
love crawling it too to harvest e-mail addresses. Welcome to the Internet.
99% of all my incoming e-mail is spam.
I've found that the most effective spam filter is a word-based filter
that is just my first name. I have a number of word-based filters set
up and none of my e-mail addresses have my first name in the address.
(All spam e-mails therefore look like, "'Hello thruska', check out this
new..."). My first name is in my sig, so if I e-mail someone and then
they reply, they automatically get through my filters without realizing
it and I don't have to do anything special. The rest of the time,
people begin e-mails to me with my first name ("Thomas, ..."). Using
"first name" is a natural spam filter and, out of almost 20,000 e-mails
downloaded today, only a half dozen spam messages made it through that
filter. Each one of those had random words stuck into the e-mail and
just got lucky.
I got fed up with heuristic spam filters not working (e.g. Spambayes),
so this was my drastic solution to the problem. Seems to work and
offers incredibly fast filtering. Spammers don't keep first and last
names around in their databases. Yet. When they do, then I'll have to
find a new strategy.
I'm sure I lose a few e-mails here or there but those are generally
people ranting about something not working in some product that they
aren't specifying. And I probably didn't want to read and reply to
their rant/complaint in the first place :)
--
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President
Ph: 517-803-4197
*NEW* MyTaskFocus 1.1
Get on task. Stay on task.
http://www.CubicleSoft.com/MyTaskFocus/
