Spam blocking (I wish...)

[Benjo]

Hi all,

I have not had problems with spam up to now (really!). I'm pretty careful
about who I give my e-mail address to and always use a web mail account for
any dubious sign-ups etc. But about a month ago one of my "official" POP
accounts obviously got into the wrong hands (I wish I knew who to sue...)
and since then I've been inundated by mails from Virginia Gibson, Leo S
Faulkner, Boyd Starr and a couple of hundred other "people" trying to get me
to buy prescription drugs from them, convince me that my penis is too small
or sell me (can you believe it...) the latest spam blocker...

Since then I've spent (literally) hours at a time trying to make Outlook
Express's message rules block this stuff for me - but with very limited
success. The senders never use the same name or address and the subject
matter is so diverse as to make it almost impossible to block. Using single
words is obviously risky because someone might just send you a legitimate
mail containing virtually any word you can think of, and anyway these guys
seem to read my mind: when I include the word "Vicodine" in the list, the
next mail I get refers to "Vic0dine", and when I add "enlarge your penis"
they come back with "enhance your girth"...

My question is simple: Am I missing something? Is there anything Outlook
Express can do? (and if not, is there anything any other program can do?) Or
once on someone's list am I doomed forever?

Thanks in advance,
B.

 

[Vanguard]

"I'm pretty careful about who I give my e-mail address to and always use
a web mail account for any dubious sign-ups etc."

Is (e-mail address removed) your real e-mail address (from the headers in
your post)? If so then, no, you are NOT careful about who you give your
e-mail address to. You just gave it to everyone in the entire world,
including the spambots that roam through the newsgroup that harvest
e-mail addresses.

http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html is one article on how to
munge. A Google search can find other helpful articles. Just be sure
to munge the domain, and don't munge it so it ends up pointing at some
other valid domain.

" Since then I've spent (literally) hours at a time trying to make
Outlook Express's message rules block this stuff for me - but with very
limitedsuccess."

So why aren't you using some anti-spam software? Some is free, some
will cost. I use SpamPal (free). If your e-mail provider includes spam
filtering, you have enabled, right?

"The senders never use the same name or address ..."

That's why it is futile to bounce back bogus non-delivery errors, like
with MailWasher. The bogus e-mail address might even be for a real
person but is NOT the spammer, so irresponsible users of
challenge-response products end up slamming innocents with "challenge
spam". You need to trace back through the Received headers to determine
how close you can get to the spammer.

"... and the subject matter is so diverse as to make it almost
impossible to block."

Don't expect them to be blatant in their spam so they'll obviously get
picked out by anti-spam filters. "Here's the information you
requested." Is it spam? Did you make a request? Are you going to
waste time looking through your Sent Items to see if you made such a
request? If if was requested via a web form, you'll have nothing to
check against to ensure you actually made the request. You could switch
off the Preview pane and use the AutoPreview mode to show as text only
the first few lines of each message, but why bother even reading or
determining what is spam rather than let some anti-spam software do it
for you?

Searching on words is futile. If the e-mail is HTML formatted, what you
see is NOT what is in the document. You see "sex" but the
HTML-formatted document has "s<#89xj>e<@idoii>x" so your bad word lists
are worthless. Even Bayesian or other filters that do not exercise on a
tag stripped version of the HTML-formatted e-mail are worthless. I use
the Bayesian plug-in for SpamPal but it won't catch spam that uses this
trick. I also use the HTML-Modify plug-in to get rid of the nasties
often employed in HTML-formatted e-mails (although using the default
Restricted Sites security zone definitely helps).