Spam finally killed me

[cjsmith]

I've turned off everything but my own addresses and they're still coming in faster than I can delete them.

I shut it all down.

I have no personal e-mail until further notice. Things won't even bounce; they'll just vanish.

Write here if you want me to see something.

Comments

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Well, now I know what to get you for Christmas - a decent spam solution :-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm willing to go to a delete-by-default solution, if the alternative is to delete everything.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

There are plenty of technologies out there that are better than what you're currently doing. With the system I'm using I do occasionally lose a real piece of email (usually something full of graphics like a receipt for a purchase from a random company) but I get literally zero spam. I'm sure we can figure something out.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

You also have an additional monthly fee, and I'd like to keep those down if I can. Let's talk about options.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Like I said - a Christmas present :-)

[deyo.livejournal.com]

I pay $20 a year for Pobox.com's redirection service, and I couldn't be happier. It catches 50-100 spam per day, and I get maybe one a week. It's been months since I had a false positive, though I wish the whitelisting were a bit more proactive.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

$20 a year is pretty minimal.

[deyo.livejournal.com]

It's not a bad deal.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, definitely worth looking into. I'd been worried about places charging $20 a month.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Gmail!

Gmail, gmail, gmail. Gmail gmail! Gmail gmail gmail.

(Also, gmail.)

You know I have two emails; my personal one, and the vito excalibur one, which I pretty much use for all interactions on public web pages. It forwards to my personal one. Between the two spam filters, I have to lay eyes on a spam message, oh, maybe once a week or so.

Of course there's also the Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html) option. :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'll skip gmail, sadly. I cannot have even the semblance of a reasonable username there ("cjsmith" is just... who I am, and that was taken before the beta invites went out) AND a multinational corporation is storing copies of all my correspondence... that one's not for me.

Donald Knuth probably has the best solution. (edit: Too bad I don't have a secretary!)

[nosrednayduj]

"yduJ" is "who I am" and it was unique until about 1998. But now it's always taken by someone who doesn't even care and wishes "judy" weren't taken. Ah well. So far the "nosrednayduj" plan is working OK. I even abandoned "yduJ" at work; I didn't press for "yduj" as username with my new job. First time. Not sure how I feel about it. Maybe I'm growing up :-)

[nurvuslee.livejournal.com]

Does this multinational corporation keep all of your emails even if they've been deleted by you?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

My most recent understanding is yes: they are no longer counted against your storage quota, but they are still kept, indexed for quick searchbot retrieval and/or undelete. However, someone who uses the service (Vito?) would know far better than I.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Forward mail from your account to gmail, then suck it back off via POP3 or IMAP, in order to outsource your spamfiltering to google (who really, truly rock at it). I wish I could take credit for the idea, but I read it in someone's blog a year or so ago.

[platypuslord.livejournal.com]

If the spammers are forging your domain name, you may have additional problems...
What if the spam filters learn to filter everything coming from your domain?

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Spam filters don't even look at the "from" address any more. It's all a matter of where the last "reliable" server (usually one under the filtering service's control) got the message from.

Server in China or Africa? Can it.
Server connected via DSL? Can it.
Server lies about its identity? Can it.
*then* look at the content for a quick heuristic analysis.

[platypuslord.livejournal.com]

Good to know.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

Uh, red4est connects via DSL.

[deyo.livejournal.com]

I think Pobox defaults to requiring three "can it" flags to drop an email. So your email is only one-third spam. ;)

[zarex.livejournal.com]

I've had great experience with fastmail.fm, and it's really cheap.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

I'll second that - mail at thok had gotten useless so I outsourced it to fastmail.fm, and it's useful again. (I also use gmail, but only for things like public mailing lists where the ads they come up with are actively interesting... but wow have they done a good job with spam, mostly by harnessing their own users :-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Sadly, fastmail.fm counts INCOMING SPAM against your bandwidth limitation. I no longer see the vast, vast majority of spam directed at me, so I can't compute bandwidth for sure, but honestly, I think that could be a dealbreaker.

I'm beginning to realize that it isn't that my current solution is BAD so much as that it's under immense pressure.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

Spamassassin is your friend.

A copy of my procmail configurtion files are here:
http://red4est.com/antispam/procmail/

With the recent upgrade to SA, I only see about 3-10 spams in my main mailbox a day.