Thread: Stopping Spam

My (bigpond) email address has been current for many years now, and the spam level has steadily dropped to around one or two a week. I don't even need a personal spam filter.

I make absolutely certain that any group I'm with displays my contact as name (at) server.com and doesn't have contact me buttons. One guy in my cycling club had his email displayed fully and he got hammered with spam. I think it's done with web crawlers or somesuch.

I'm with Optus and have a parent email address that's used only for things like banks, insurance, et al.

Off that I can have 5 child addresses. One is my wife's, one for my late son (we still get emails for him), one is used on all other things like this forum. The last (I still have a spare) is what I used to use and which was shown on the rangerovers.net pages. It gets most spam. It's not set up in Outlook so I don't see that mail there.

I also filter all my mail through MailWasher which marks most spam for deletion so it never gets downloaded.

Every so often I look at the spammed email address to see if there's anything I should see. There usually isn't except for the odd cry for help from RR owners and which I've missed (I no longer visit RR.net or the forum).

If my main address, i.e., the one I use here, starts to get spammed, I'll dump it and create a new one - whilst knowing my banking, insurance, etc., stuff will be unaffected.

The spam filters on gmail are very good!

I have a forward on my public email addressess to my gmail account, and have configured Outlook to download gmail as well. Once a week I check gmail through a browser and check the spam box. Anything legit I flag, and that person doesn't get caught again.

Very impressed, although I do have a niggle that all my email goes through Google...

the spammers do dictionary lookups on all known isps on a regular basis.

in reality, it makes little difference, on the whole, whether you attempt to hide your email address or not.

using it on public forums will definitely increase the level of spam for short periods, as will installing a toolbar.

my mail servers run scripts that will temporarily block people from doing dictionary lookups on them but they still try several times a month.

Originally Posted by theresanothersteve

The spam filters on gmail are very good!

I have a forward on my public email addressess to my gmail account, and have configured Outlook to download gmail as well. Once a week I check gmail through a browser and check the spam box. Anything legit I flag, and that person doesn't get caught again.

Very impressed, although I do have a niggle that all my email goes through Google...

yep, is a good way of doing it...

Ok - thanks for all the comments - as I said only a few actually get through to me directly but I still need to review them all whether caught by the ISP or myself. I guess I just have to wait it out and hope it goes away after a while.

Thanks

Garry

Just put anyone you want to receive email from in your contacts list and set the email filters to only receive mail from people in your contact list.

The rest is, rightfully, spam and ignored.

Works for me.

Since switching to Thunderbird years ago we rarely get any apart from the odd nigerian scam email but even then hardly ever.