Which Anti spam program?

bobsmum

Having been through a phase of getting around 100 spam mails a day, I've tried both Coffee Cup Spam Blocker which seemed quite good. Then switched about 6 months ago to Spamhilator which also seemed to work pretty well.

However I have recently taken the advice of some of the techie gurus on this forum and have switched to using Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express - that combined with reasonable anti-spam filters provided by my ISP (UKOnline) means not much is getting through at all. Very pleased with T'bird so far.

HTH

vinylmusic

Loobeylou wrote:

Anyone else tried Spamihilator? Good and bad reports please.

A couple of months ago I started to get spam into my main e-mail address - yes I know now that I should not have used this e-mail address for ANYTHING, but there you go. I am now getting numerous spam every day, and it is increasing.

So in the absence of being able to block or change my main e-mail address, I am looking for something which will stop this junk.

I also have Norton on my machine - would one affect the other?

It looks like spamihilator has disappeared from the internet
Everything I have tried results with "Page not found"
I tried:
http://www.spamihilator.com/ and all links I could find on google
Same happens when I click on links from some of their afilliate sites.

I have finally managed to download it from http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlspami.html
I'm going to give it a try but wonder if the company producing it have gone out of business and therefore could spamihilator_9_9_9 be the last available version?

krishna

We get several hundred spam a day at work. Switched from Outlook to Thunderbird to take advantage of the inbuilt antispam filters. They worked fine for a good 18 months I think, but spammers seem to be better at cloaking their emails these days. More and more is getting through. Takes a lot of our time to get rid of it so I'm now looking at putting us all back to Outlook so that we can use Cloudmark. Absolutely the best solution I have seen but only works with Outlook and Outlook Express and you have to pay for it, though not a great deal. Essentially you join the Cloudmark community and everyone identifies mail as spam. That way if one person sees it as spam it is identified as spam for the whole community. A little more to it than that, but that's the gist of it and it is incredibly effective. Can't recommend it more highly. Just a shame we will have to give up Thunderbird as our mail client. Grown used to some of the great extensions.

krishna

Al_Mac wrote:

The safest thing is being careful with your address. I get no spam and I've had the address for about 7 years. And I do use it when registering for everything. I have never posted it on a newsgroup though.

Lucky you! Trouble is you need everyone else to be careful with your address too. Not always achievable.

j_davies

krishna wrote:

Lucky you! Trouble is you need everyone else to be careful with your address too. Not always achievable.

Now if someone gives your email addy out thats unlawful under the Data protection Act.

vinylmusic

j_davies wrote:

Now if someone gives your email addy out thats unlawful under the Data protection Act.

Thats good to know but is it enforcable?
How can you prove it?
Who can you report it to?
Who's going to take any notice and do something about it?

I'd like to find out more about organisations like spam cop and spamhaus.
I know they've been around for a long time but then are they having much effect?
As far as I can tell over time the spam problem just gets worse, not better.

I can only see it ever get better if some people in positions higher up can effect changes in laws to seriously outlaw spammers with serious penalties, and this has to be done on an international scale.

Until then we and all those people higher up too will have to tolerate the huge amount of wasted time and money it causes, not to mention the huge amount of irritation that goes with it

I am astonished that after all the time that spam has been such a headache effecting just about everyone that uses email that spammers are getting away with it. They must be laughing at the whole system

cwoodham

vinylmusic wrote:

Its not so easy to change email address. Mine is linked to my domain name so its [EMAIL="anything@mydomainname.co.uk"]anything@mydomainname.co.uk[/EMAIL]
I'm going to ask my domain host haisoft if they can do something about it

There is another possibility which someone pointed out on another thread. Because you can put anything before mydomainname.com you could use a unique identifier for each person you give your email address to, e.g. [EMAIL="yournametheirname@mydomainname.com"]yournametheirname@mydomainname.com[/EMAIL]

That way if spam came back to you with that particular email address as 'sender' you would know who passed it on or whose PC address book had been raided by the spammers and you could advise them to tighten up their security. HTH

cwoodham

vinylmusic wrote:

I am astonished that after all the time that spam has been such a headache effecting just about everyone that uses email that spammers are getting away with it. They must be laughing at the whole system

If you get a chance, have a read of Dan DiNicolo's Rant column in February 2007 issue of PC Answers. He argues that the 'good guys' (developing anti-spam, anti-virus software) are making a lot of money selling us their products and are always there helping find new solutions to fight the 'bad guys' (spammers). There's no incentive on their part to get rid of spam. He reckons 10 years from now we will still be fighting this 'never-ending electronic war'.

vinylmusic

cwoodham wrote:

If you get a chance, have a read of Dan DiNicolo's Rant column in February 2007 issue of PC Answers. He argues that the 'good guys' (developing anti-spam, anti-virus software) are making a lot of money selling us their products and are always there helping find new solutions to fight the 'bad guys' (spammers). There's no incentive on their part to get rid of spam. He reckons 10 years from now we will still be fighting this 'never-ending electronic war'.

Yes I had already thought of that.
Just yesterday I heard a line in a movie (48 hours I think it was) If there were no criminals the police would be out of a job.
The same goes for spammers. Theres a lot of big buisinesses making a packet out of anti spam programs. As well as the big boys such as Norton and Mcafee there are lots more in on the act. I dont think that any of them would be too quick to complain.

I hope people will keep posting on this forum so that we may discover ways to effect changes. Its a sure thing that if we say nothing, do nothing then nothing will change.

By the way. On advice from forum members I switched from mailwasher to spamihilator. It's early days but appears to be much better and what's more its free where mailwasher pro costs $37

ollyk

Wombat wrote:

Changing your email address would certainly work, although I think eventually you would be back to square one with the one that you use for online form filling.

Rubbish - it is generally few things that cause problems with spam...

1. Not caring which sites you submit your email too - this includes people who can't be bothered to properly read the little form tick box's and don't read through privacy policies etc... only takes a few minutes - much quicker than deleting all the spam :rotfl:

2. One thing I hate is !!!!!! heads who put your email in a looong list of other contacts i.e. those group email things - that has got to be a spammers wet dream! Politly tell such d1cks to remove your address from such 'groups'.

3. Does your account allow for secondary emails? use these for friends and primary email for important things be carefull what and more importantly how you fill forms & accounts in and I promise you will not get spam.