Spam Hell

[greenie]

My webmail email account I've had for almost 20 years gets between 20-50 spam emails daily despite having filters on maximum. The spam themes run in cycles - internet security like McAfee lately - lots of congratulations for winning something, lots of junk from Walgreens, Lowes, and Home Depot.  I add each one to a spam list but the spammers use a address each time.
I've always used an AOL account for purchases other than EBay and Amazon and most other internet contacts - that account is relatively clear of spam.
Anyone have any suggestions? New email account?

[DC Concours]

Who's your email provider? I would say get a new email address because these are going to keep coming. If you want to keep your old address, one trick that may work is fwd current emails to a new email address with a new provider with stronger spam protection. The new provider may catch the spam. Doesn't always work though.

[greenie]

I heard Outlook has good detection - I could forward to Outlook, I'll give it a try.

Thanks!

[greenie]

Forwarding to an Outlook account works well. Somehow Webmail can't weed out obvious spam.

[Boomer]

I used to have the email address Boomer at GTR1000.com but had to get rid of it as I was getting so much spam that it was filling my mailbox allowance in under 5 days. I may be able to reinstate it now as the address I replaced it with BFG at GTR1000.com hasn't received anywhere near as much spam and it's been over 10 years since the Boomer account got shutdown.
The company that hosts my domains now has a pretty good spam filter and keeps it well under control, but back then I was often deleting 1000+ spam emails per day. Now I get maybe 2-3 per week that get through the filters.
I have a few webmail accounts but they don't seem to suffer from it so much.

[greenie]

1,000 spam emails a day? Holy cow!  And here I was crabbing about 50.

[lather]

I  have been using spamarrest for several years. It costs about  40 or 50 a year if I recall but is worth it in my opinion.

[VirginiaJim]

I use gmail and it's very rare that I get what I would call unsolicited 'spam'.  You know the emails from Nigerian princes and the like.  I get a bit more from Yahoo so I'm thinking at least for me gmail does a better job.

[maxtog]

I have to manage our Email at work, among 1,000,000 other things.  Spam is a never ending PITA.  I have all kinds of banlists, greylisting, RBL lists, etc, etc.  We block something like 90% of all incoming mail BEFORE it is delivered (blocked at the SMTP negotiation in Postfix).

[VirginiaJim]

Glad to see that you made it back!   We're using Mimecast at work that seems to catch the blatant spams.  I still get at least one a day now that I have to block.

[lather]

I manage the mail accounts for our club and the server uses spamassasin. I think it works too well and we are missing a lot of messages. Ive tried to reconfigure it with noo luck. Anybody familar with  Apache SpamAssassin?

[Strawboss]

I use outlook too and get very little spam, but I'm not as active as others and don't really buy anything online, plus, I have different identities for different things I do online such as, purchases, very rare, are a separate address, family, a separate one too, not sure if that makes a difference though. 
 

[maxtog]

I manage the mail accounts for our club and the server uses spamassasin. I think it works too well and we are missing a lot of messages. Ive tried to reconfigure it with noo luck. Anybody familar with  Apache SpamAssassin?

I can't help with that, because we attempt to do all our blocking before delivery.  SpamAssassin, I believe, is [mostly] a post-delivery tool that "rates" delivered mail based on a variety of filters and criteria, assigning a spam "score."  You can then decide to pass the Email along to the user with that score, or redirect it to nowhere if the score is too bad.  It is a complex system that, if not setup and maintained well, will, indeed, create chaos.  It is especially unpredictable when using bayesian and key-word filters.

Email really is a nightmare to admin now, and has been for over a decade.  This is why so many companies and organizations and even ISPs just give up and allow "professional" third-parties to manage their Email.  And that is also how such organizations now have access to all your data and can manipulate what you are "allowed" to send or receive.

[greenie]

It really shouldn't be that hard - most of the spam I get comes from email addresses with a long series of numbers and letters. I can spot them easily - why can't a program spot them?
Webmail (which is my primary email) for the last couple of days sent spam to the spam folder with precision - 150 yesterday alone but it's doubtful it will continue - it never does. This email is provided by my dsl provider. My throwaway email is AOL which I've had since 1995. AOL does a respectable job sorting out the spam. Outlook has done well - it intelligently sorts out spam but the forwarding is a PITA.
Spam email and telemarketer scams would stop if people weren't so darned stoopid in falling for these tricks.

[Boomer]

Spam email and telemarketer scams would stop if people weren't so darned stoopid in falling for these tricks.

You can't fix stupid, at least not legally. 

[lather]

I can't help with that, because we attempt to do all our blocking before delivery.  SpamAssassin, I believe, is [mostly] a post-delivery tool that "rates" delivered mail based on a variety of filters and criteria, assigning a spam "score."  You can then decide to pass the Email along to the user with that score, or redirect it to nowhere if the score is too bad.  It is a complex system that, if not setup and maintained well, will, indeed, create chaos.  It is especially unpredictable when using bayesian and key-word filters.

Email really is a nightmare to admin now, and has been for over a decade.  This is why so many companies and organizations and even ISPs just give up and allow "professional" third-parties to manage their Email.  And that is also how such organizations now have access to all your data and can manipulate what you are "allowed" to send or receive.

I appreciate that info on SpamAssassin.  It is incorporated in cPanel, our server management software and documentation is sorely lacking. I have access to the scoring system but it includes a couple hundred rules, only half a dozen of which make any sense to me.  I tried raising the score threshold to the least aggressive but that had no effect. It does have a white list and that works for me  but that will be a pia to implement for all our other users. 

[maxtog]

It does have a white list and that works for me  but that will be a pia to implement for all our other users.

Yep, we have an elaborate whitelist.  There is no way around it, since we block big third-party marketing sites, like salesforce, constantcontact, hubspot, etc.  99% of their stuff is marketing spam.  But some legit companies still decide to use those sites to send legit mail.  So I have to find those and whitelist them, if I can.  It takes significant time.

The problem is that it costs senders essentially $0 to send out billions of crap messages a day.  And every company thinks it is their "right" to send you whatever crap they want, and as often as they want, just because you gave them your Email address to purchase something or to access some site.  And they try to justify their crap by calling them  "surveys" and "followup" and "newsletters."  And they try to intentionally circumvent blocking by registering lots of different variations of their domain names for their mail servers.  Oh, and despite their claims, they offer and sell lists from one purpose to others for other purposes.

ConstantContact even had the gall to send a US mail letter to my CEO, explaining why we shouldn't block their important messages to our business.  He laughed.

[maxtog]

Webmail (which is my primary email) for the last couple of days sent spam to the spam folder with precision - 150 yesterday alone but it's doubtful it will continue - it never does. This email is provided by my dsl provider. My throwaway email is AOL which I've had since 1995. AOL does a respectable job sorting out the spam. Outlook has done well - it intelligently sorts out spam but the forwarding is a PITA.

One problem is that you don't know what is being blocked that you NEVER see.  I have first-hand proof that legit, personal Email from me, sent from a first-party, has been blocked without delivery, going to major sites like Google, Outlook, etc.  The sending domain wasn't on any blocklist (I checked), and the person I was sending to knows me, and wanted the Email.  The receiving SITE just didn't like the content.  It is part of the reality now; as we hand the keys of communication to large tech companies, they have the power to censor whatever THEY don't like.  Of course, that is a another topic entirely...