Its ok, i keep getting asked if my brests are large enugh :s (btw im male!)

but anyway, the permission based email filtering, is a great concept, but it drives me insane.

Nearly all the emials that the company i work for sends out are automated, and we very rarely see the replies (as they just hit a junk folder). Now, we dont always send from the same email address.

If its a update about everything in general it comes from a central email address, if its something specific, it comes fromanother. The problem comes that our clients, dont always white list us, and oftern to back to us and say we never got your email (when its a price increace its a nightmare!) When ever i look through the junkfolder, there is normally about 5-600 differnet people wanting us to verify our email address. When you are talking about that amount, its not viable for us to do, espically when theres about 20 email addresses we would need to verify. Im sure a lot of big sites have the same problem with this type of system.

The best SPAM filter is yourself, nothing can beat it. Heres where i start (just started doing this again as i am changing domains)

1. Register a domain
2. Quickly change all the details on the whois records to whois@newdomain.com (you need to do this quickly so it doenst get chached anywhere with your old meail address)
3. Setup 2 email accounts, 1 main@newdomain.com and 1 spam@newdomain.com make the first one a catch all account.
4. Set spam@newdomain.com to bounce all emails, with a message that they cannot send you email because of spam.

Now when someone asks for your email address, you give them something like www_adminfusion_com@newdomain.com This tells you exactly where it comes from (incase you need to signup at a subdomain) now because you have a catch all, you dont need to create a new account to get it. If you start getting Spam, take a look at the headers, and you will be able to see who it was sent to, you can then add that email address as an alias of spam@newdomain.com and there you go, perfect spam filtering, with the added bonus, that if you start recving spam, from a site that says they will not send spam, and will not sell your email address, you can prove that they sent it, because it has there domain name, and you only gave tht email address to them.

If you want to give friends an email address to contact you on, then you just give them there_name@newdomain.com (thus if you get spammed, you can trace it, and give them a new email address and/or block them)

The problem then comes business cards if you need them, this is where its hard to stop, however, one way is to use business@newdomain.com and then have a auto response telling them to email say business.1@newdomain.com to contact you. If this email address starts getting spoam, you can easily change it to business.2 and everyone will still be able to contact you.

It might sound complex to setup, but it will take you about an extra 30 seconds each time you get spam to setup the new alias (if your a programmer, you could always make a program that you jsut typein the email address you want to block and it setups the alias for you. rather than logging into a control panel to do it.

If you really want to help stop spam, dont bounce your spam email address, keep it seperate, and when you have some free time, download it and report all the spam emails that you find, and if you find one that is not spam, contact them with a new email address.

http://spamcop.com/ is very handy for finding out who you need to report spam to. Remember to report the full headers, and the whole email. Some companys will respond to you, some will not, if you really want to fight spam, email them once a week till you get a response from them.

Remeber tho, to set your from email address and reply email address to them_at_theredomain_com@newdomain.com so you can make sure they dont spam you.

It sounds like a lot of work, but its worth it, personally on my old domain, i used to get about 1 spam email a week, i would block it, and then on a sunday, i would normally sit for about 30 minuites reporting spam emails, and asking for a response from who i was repoting it to.

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You're right, it does sound like a lot of work...too much for me to worry about, heh. Just look at this, look at how much we are going through these days just to run from unwanted email. It shouldnt be like this, it's a shame. I mean, what have we come to when we have to do like you have suggested, and give our friends a separate account to send to just because we cannot trust them?

Its not that i dont trust my friends, ive explained it to most of mine, its incase there account gets hijacked, they forward and email to everyone with my address in and get gets picked up... a lot of reason.

From some research i did a while ago, about 1% of people still respond to spam, that means if they spam 100 people, one of those people will buy something (that they are norally making about $20 on). So all i have to do, if buy a mailing list (which can be found all over the place) or build one using a crawler, grab a hosting account and email them all (pick a new host and do it at night so that its ages before they find the problem) and thats it i jsut made a years worth of money. Its sad but true.

If everyone would stop buying from spam emails, it would be perfect, as the spammers would slowwly relize its useless and stop.

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Good ah speach there awibble. I hate spam and um do sometimes even when you click there spam emails, od they get paid? i saw it on the news i think, so i dont even open them up.

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Thanks to Awibble, I want to start spamming.

Spamming, by all accounts is very profitiable, espically if you use servers in countries where its not illegal....

When i was last talking to our DC about spam, i was told that some places use fake offshore companies, with off sure servers, so its 100% legal for them to do. Because the internet itsself has no laws, but the laws fall under communication laws in your country, its very hard to stop.

I had an idea of developing a SPAM free email system, sort of like Email v2 where all emails where handled by one giant database, with IMAP connections so people ould have it on there local machine. This could prevent spam, as only one server ahs to deal with the emials, so theres no way to sort of sneek them in. The problem would be getting support for it, but the theory is sound.

If you want to help stop spam, you need to try not to open spam emails, make sure your email client doesnt downlaod pictures automatically, get your friends to do the same, and there friends and eventuially it will die out.

Interestingly enugh, a spammer sent an email to me, which bounced, and they reported my bounce message as spam, basically because the spammer used a fake emial address in the from and reply to lines (thats another thing that centralising email would do, no way to fake headers).

If i remember correctly, its estimated that nearly 30% of all internet bandwidth is spam, and something like 80% of all email traffic is from spam.

There is also reports that claim that big spam provention companies actually pay people to send spam to sell there products, something which if ture will stop as more and more people choose open source software.


You might want to start spamming for the profit, but dont forget, in many countries (and its growing) gettting caught can resuilt in jail time!

Incase you didnt relize, spam or UBE / UCE is one of my pet hates, and i have tried many ways to stop and actively fight spam. One thing that i was working on was a system, that had a delete button for email and a delete and report button. When reported it would automatially do a lookup for the correct abuse email them, with all the headers and email content, and store the IP addresses / email address / hostnames and content in a database to help build more accurate filters in the future.

Lets face it, everyone hates spam, even spammers, if everyone on the internet was to work together, it could be stopped, but only if everyone worked together.

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This is the truth. I've seen many reports of people getting thrown in jail and/or being fined big bucks for spam. If the government can pin down those who are doing it, I can assure you that they will not take it lightly

And if you even think about doing it in russia, this is worth a read...

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=24631

Ive actually started to come up with a great idea for a website... when ryan lets of the whip a little i will think about it some more

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Good luck

I suggest you do some strength and endurance training to focus on getting away from me instead of hoping I loosen my grip on the whip

Every service I sign up with I make a unique email forwarded, such as adminfusion@mydomain.com (I didn't choose this) and once I start to see spam I see where it's being sent to and delete the forwarder. Even my personal email address is a forwarder, and only my friends get that.

It's an awesome way to combat spam and works like a charm. I know where spam is coming from and can stop it at any time.