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...inspires things like this, best computer smash I've seen since that one with the guy in his office a few years ago. Ad agencies are finally getting it right. :)

Challenge response seems to do the same thing - block all email except the ones you want through. Works well for me (I use http://www.spamarrest.com/ which is pretty good for $30 a year, saves me downloading the emails first)

The two best solutions I know of (if you don't own the server) are Spamarrest and POPFile.

Both get rid of spam very differently but I've gotten about 99.8% acuracy with both (for different people)

SpamArrest uses "Challenge/Response" which is annoying if you have lots of new people email you but if it's mainly old email addresses it's great.

If you don't want to pay anything then POPFile is for you. It uses Bayesian filtering which basically means it learns what you think spam is. That means it might take a couple of weeks to train it but then it's great. As spam changes so does it (retraining). The only things it's gets wrong for me are things like newsletters (or good spam for lack of a better name).

Anyway good luck.

Spamarrest seems like it has a better CAPTCHA mechanism: sample image. The loops are pretty ugly; certainly more difficult to subvert than dark characters on a light background (with no dark obfuscators). For myself, I use bogofilter. After piping a bunch of known good ("ham") and bad ("spam") through the engine. I get almost no spam that isn't caught and quarantined for later inspection.

For the last couple of years his specialty has been defending spammers against the WA spam law, including setting up corporate structures to avoid liability for spam, as shown when one his clients was sued by Microsoft.

Newman also represents SpamArrest, the Seattle spamming anti-spam company.

Basically Newman and Newman chases any dot com ambulance they can find. Their track record however is remarkably poor, and if you look at the record of their spam cases they have lost almost all of them.

> There's a commercial solution using this system right now, although the URL escapes me

Spam Arrest?

Spam Arrest works pretty well for avoiding spam. It costs money (as much as $3.33/month) but it works well. When somebody sends you e-mail, it replies with a confirmation link. The user must click on the link and type in a simple computer-generated text code to be whitelisted. They only have to do this one since once they are whitelisted they can send as many e-mails as desired. Stops nearly all automatic mass mailers and spam from fake e-mail addresses. Not free and perhaps lacks in geek factor, but it's simple and effective.

So far the best thing I've seen is the challenge response systems like bluebottle (free but very slow) or spamarrest (never used it, costs $34.95 per year).

I've been using bluebottle for over a month now and its so much nicer knowing new emails are really just that. Unfortunately its slow enough (at least the web interface, pop is faster) that I won't start recommending it to family and non-techy friends.

The founder/owner of Enic.cc is a friend of a friend whom I've met before. A couple of years ago I had heard that Enic had signed the deal with Laos, then I saw this article today, and it made me scratch my head.

Of course, he (Brian Cartmell) is kind of a blowhard, so maybe he was in negotiations and never actually sold .la domains.

Just curious.....

My article for building this got denied last night so I'll post it here instead. To create a list of authenticated users automatically that allows people to enter their address etc.. via a web form (much like Spam Arrest visit this how-to. It requires only a web server, php interpreter and Mercury e-mail server.

Recent articles haven't mentions Digiportal or Mail Frontier, so it is possible that they have come to an agreement with Mailblocks.

Full article (dated 4/05/03) from the San Jose Mercury News.

I think Mailblocks is the perfect example of a company the /. crowd would hate: rich guy comes into the market late, drops a bundle of money, scoops up some shaky patents, and tries to sue/shutdown their competitors (some of which have been in business for over a year longer than them).

By the way, Spam Arrest, one of Mailblocks' competitors (and currently being sued by Mailblocks) has no disk quota. (10 MB max message size though). Their enterprise product will forward messages through to your smtp server. A little pricey, but good for businesses.

Matador also does challenge-response (in addition to filtering) but runs on your desktop, if you are into that kind of thing.

Yes, I've done a lot of research into the anti-spam products!

This is pretty much exactly what SpamArrest does. I've been trying it out for a couple of weeks, looks good so far. I will probably subscribe at the end of the free first month. Going from 180 spams a day to *none* is very very nice indeed, and certainly beats the alternative of ditching my favourite 7 year old email address.

• When you get an email, check black and whitelist. Blacklist: delete (or bounce). Whitelist: deliver.
  
• If email is not in either list, send an automatic response back to sender. Force them to visit website to confirm their humanity using a character recognition system where they look at an image and type in the word/characters/etc pictured.
  
• If they respond, add them to the whitelist and deliver queued mail
  
• Mail not handled by either list or verified queues up for a certain amount of time, during which the mail user can go and flag specific addresses as whitelisted (allowing them to pass through things when they do things like sign up for mailing lists or accounts or other things which generate automatic email)
  
• After a certain number of days queued up, drop/reject queued email.
  

Arf, it says 'patent pending' at the bottom of the site, hope their patent application fails...

Check out an online service called SpamArrest.

It's probably a bit late for those who were reading the comments initially, but you would be advised to stay well away from SpamArrest. They're spammers. :)

(and no, that smiley is just to indicate irony - I'm absolutely serious about SpamArrest being spammers)

See

1. here,
2. here, and
3. here.

Pete.

My first clue was the 50000 bounces in my inbox. Then, the flood of unsubcribes & death threats.

I ended up signing the domain up for Spam Arrest, which sends an auto-reply explaining the situation back to whomever, and they need to pass the spam filter challenge in order to send stuff through to me.

I still get some unsubscribes and angry people, but I think for the most part they understand.

a few days later, another spammer sent stuff from another address at my domain, (blow@me.cx, creative, huh?) so I just added that to Spam Arrest too.

Check out an online service called SpamArrest.

For about $20, you route your incoming domain email through their whitelist email servers. Anyone who's not on the list is automatically sent an email with a link for people who want to be added to the whitelist. The link takes you to a page where you have to type in a word that you see on the page (the word is in a graphic and is partially obscurred to twart spammer countermeasures).

Of course, a spammer could just click on the link and add his name, but is he going to do that for all 60,000 emails he just sent out? Probably not.

Why not have the anti-spam filter reply to the message sender with a message explainig that his message has been filtered and requesting that he resends the message to a specific, one time only, e-mail address? Spammers would get all their e-mail back and someone trying to contact you would have a way of sending you an e-mail even if he gets filtered.

An example:
- jonh_doe@example.com sends an e-mail to joane.doe@example.com
- For some reason Joane's e-mail reader rejects the e-mail as spam and sends a reply to John telling him to resend the message to joanne.doe-617131243@example.com
- John does has told and the message his delivered
- The generated e-mail address is deleted

This solution combines the best of spam filters and systems requiring the user to prove he is human (like Spam Arrest). Could this work?

I've seen those too, but with some investigation I've come to this conclusion: It's not spam arrest doing the ads (as far as I can tell -- turn your cookie warnings on and try clicking the link). The spammers are signed up as affiliates for spam arrest! how ironic is that?!!! :)

I don't know about that but their 30-day free trial sign up page pops up an SSL certificate warning for me (unknown issuer).

During the animation at Spamarrest, I kept expecting to see a doodie! Yucky!

How about solutions like bluebottle and spam arrest. They are both ASPs that are essentially dynamic whitelists. If an unknown sender sends you an email, they are sent an autoreply with a challenge. Only real people can solve the challenge, and when they do, they are added to your whitelist. You can still override the whitelist (to explicitly block a spammer who somehow authorized themself), as well as prepopulate it. They also work with mailing lists; and you can go in at anytime and check your unverified email. I use spam arrest, and I love it!

It's similar in approach to Spam Arrest Spam Arrest is annoying, and I refused to "authorize" my email address, which was problematic for me since the person using it was on a listserv I actively participated in. Every message I sent got me a Spam Arrest message sent to me asking for authorization.

There's no filtering or anything, they require senders to verify themselves, then the mail gets forwarded to you (you use them as your pop server).

Seems to work pretty well, at least it stops anyone using a fake from address or any automated systems.

I did have to go in there and add things like orders@amazon.com, and a couple others, and all my friends.

they have a free trial right now, so it might be worth a shot.