> I'm interested in what all those obvious anti-spam techniques were as I
> would like to apply them. I'm also interested because by employer has
> installed some anti-spam filtering software on the servers, and went
> through a rather lengthy test period to ensure it's effectiveness. My
> impression was that it wasn't cheap or simple.
Don, general-purpose anti-spam techniques are a bit complicated ... but an
easy thing to do with list traffic is assume that anything that comes
through the Team.Net domain is not spam. I have a filter set up that moves
all list traffic into it's own folder, which is spam-free.
Unfortunately I don't use Netscape 7, so I can't give you a blow-by-blow of
how to set up a filter, but maybe that's enough to get you started down the
right track.
Some other techniques that work quite well for me :
1) Be very certain that your web browser does not know your email address.
Internet Explorer loves to pass it out to anyone that asks ... I know my
email client does not store it in the registry so I searched my registry and
replaced everywhere that my email address appeared with a bogus address.
Took a few months, but the drop in spam was amazing.
2) Get an ISP that allows you to have multiple email addresses, and to
change them. Setup an address just to use whenever you order on-line, then
change it when it starts getting a lot of spam. With a little creativity,
you can even figure out who is selling your email address and refuse to do
any further business with them.
3) Many spammers (in my experience anyway) use the same domain name ...
setup a filter based only on the domain name. There are various places on
the net that publish lists of "spam domains", a quick Google on "cm02.net"
should turn up lots of them.
4) Hopefully this is obvious ... Never, ever, respond to the instructions on
how to "opt out", unless you are certain that you opted in to begin with.
This is a very common technique to "verify" your email address, and while
it's possible that you'll never get spam from that particular sender again,
being verified makes your email address much more valuable, so you can be
certain that they will sell it to multiple other spammers.
5) If you can, disable scripts and HTML in email. No one has any business
sending you a script via email, but they are very useful to spammers trying
to verify your address; I have them blocked completely. HTML I will accept
only from very limited sources.
Using these techniques, I delete maybe 2 or 3 pieces of spam per week per
hand and the spam folder from step 3) above has remained empty for several
months now.
Randall
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