Sapphire said:
I have Outlook 2003 at work and am able to block offending email and
prevent
them from getting to my inbox.
Wrong. That is the anti-spam feature that your Exchange admin added
to their mail setup. Your e-mail client is not what is preventing you
from seeing the crap. Your mail server is the one doing that.
I have Outlook 2003 at home also but that
feature does not seem to be present.
Because you are not using your company's Exchange server, whatever
anti-spam solution they implemented, and the expertise of their IT
folks to setup their mail system.
I continue to get unwanted emails from
companies which claim to have an unsubscribe, but it does not work.
You consider spammers to be honest folk? You unsubscribing means you
are telling them that they hit a valid e-mail address, something
valuable to them. Unless it is a legitimate site, like Intel,
Microsoft, Adobe, or other known site then unsubscribing tells them to
send you more of their crap. Ooh, they've got a live one. They're
not letting you off the hook once they get you.
I have
tried to filter out the email by creating rules but they don't work.
They do but only to the capacity for you to craft well written rules,
but rules are just rules so if an e-mail doesn't fit your rules then
obviously your rules won't trigger on that e-mail. OL2003 has its
junk filter (Bayes filter) but that method alone is not sufficient to
detect all spam, especially since many spams will attempt to poison
Bayes filters (some are more susceptible than others, and this spam
increased severely when Microsoft added their own) and some simply
vary their payload sufficiently to get different keywords selected so
their new crap doesn't get tagged as spam. Bayesian is a word
weighting databased scheme that attempts to *guess* at what is spam or
ham.
Get a real anti-spam solution. Some are free, some are
commercialware. SpamPal is free. It includes a Bayesian filter
plug-in (with a few more tweak settings than you get in OL2003),
detection using DNSBLs (DNS blacklists of known source IPs of spam),
you can block by country, you can block mails from dynamically IP
addressed hosts (like infected user hosts running mailer trojans
versus normal mail hosts that have static IP addresses), and other
methods for spam detection. Some beginners like Mailwasher but don't
bother with the severely crippled free version which disables all the
claimed features of Mailwasher (which are only in the paid Pro
version) - and NEVER use its bogus bounce feature because those
misdirected bounces can get you blacklisted by reporting your bogus
backscatter to the blacklists, like SpamCop. Seems every major
end-user security vendor selling bloated suites has an anti-spam
program, like Norton and McAfee.
