From: Jim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>I am subscribed to several of these LEM lists and yet I am only receiving about 7 spams a day (and actually seeing only about ONE per day). I'll describe my strategy below. This is not meant to invalidate your suggestion, which I think is a good one, but to help you cut down on and manage that completely ridiculous amount of spam.
I am sure I'm not the only one who's experienced the rising tide of unsolicited commercial email ("spam") from this list. The reason I'm sure of that is because of the 8 email accounts I use, this is one of my least frequently used accounts, essentially only for these two LEM lists. Yet it accounts for 137 of the 168 UCEs I've received in the last 24 hours.
1. Change ISPs. It's clear that your ISP is doing a lousy job filtering out the spam. When I moved from RoadRunner to Earthlink Hi-Speed, I went from about 40 spams a day to ZERO. To date (a month later) I have not received a single solitary spam from the Earthlink account -- but of course I have their spamblocking set to high (people in my addressbook only).
2. Dot-Mac. As you can see above, one of the reasons I don't get any spam from Earthlink is because I don't use that email address except for sending. Instead, I use my .Mac account, and Apple has been very good about controlling spam. While 100% of the spam I *do* get comes from .Mac, we're talking about maybe 7-8 a day, and in a typical 24 hour period all but one of them will go straight to the Junk folder with no intervention on my part, so I don't see them and they are flushed automatically. This alone is worth roughly half the annual fee IMHO.
3. Mail.app. What can I say, I haven't found anything to beat it when it comes to spam. I do "augment" the built-in Junk filter with a "rule" that's tied to an Applescript called Spamholio (which you can find at the usual Mac download outlets), and I can't say whether it's doing most of the work or not. All I know is, the combination have roughly a 90% accuracy rate. I hear Spam Assassin works very well for other email programs, so give that a shot if you're using something else.
4. (Important!) Turn OFF html display in your email! Junk mail that gets opened by you usually has "web bugs" in it (small invisible graphics that must be fetched from the spammers' server) that lets them know IMMEDIATELY that you opened the spam and where you are. Result: lots more spam.
I really like the way Mail handles this: if images are off, and you get an email with embedded images in it that you open on purpose (like a friend sending pictures, for example), there's aways a banner across the top of the mail that asks if you want to load images for that particular piece of email only. Works like a charm, and even if you DO open a piece of spam accidentally, the spammer will never know it.
I'm one of those people who believes that email should be for ASCII text and attachements only, so I don't even think twice about turning off the HTML. Indeed the only time I turn it on these days is if I get an Amazon gift certificate or an Apple spam. :)
Anyway, I realise that not all of these suggestions are practical for you to take up, but hopefully one or more will be of some use. You gotta get that spam down -- even if you're just deleting the stuff, you're losing by my estimate about a half-hour a day dealing with it. Not good.
_Chas_
Mnemonic of the Year: ABBA -- Anybody But Bush Again. http://www.abbaparty.com
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