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Anti-Spam Software for Mom?
daemondev asks: "As a software engineer and FreeBSD user, I've had no problem setting up and using the early anti-spam solutions like Spam-Assassin, TMDA and PopFile. I'm reasonably happy with where I am today, but it certainly could still be better! On the other hand, these solutions are not at all appropriate for my mom, who now has a huge spam problem (she really doesn't need all of that Viagra). I'm looking for something that works "out of the box" and doesn't require a lot of in depth knowledge about email and text filters, and which ideally doesn't need to be updated and replaced continuously. She uses Outlook 2000 on Windows ME. Has anyone found a good package that they would trust to stop spam but that's easy enough for their mom to use?"
Mozilla mail
Mail for OS X seems good also.
I know that doesn't answer your question... does she right click and add to junk email senders list? Not real effective anymore, but it will get a few of them.
Is she using POP3 or IMAP?
If you are running that FreeBSD system as a server, you could run a fetchmail to get her mail off of her ISP's server, filter it, and let her then retrieve the filtered mail from your server. That may or may not be a lot of work, depending on your setup.
Cloudmakr produces SpamNet. It works great for me. I get between 300-400 spam per day and it removes about 95% of those. you can find the product on http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/
This is something I've been trying to investigate myself, without much success. We (that is, me and my father, from whom I inherit my geekiness) have tried an older version of SpamAssassin in the past, but she seemed to have a problem with false positives with it (or at least she was extremely worried about them; I dunno if any actually happened), so it got rejected.
I've been strongly considering trying the new version with the Bayesian filtering capabilities, but this brings to mind two issues - 1) we don't actually run our own mailserver, which complicates things (I use it myself via a Sylpheed plugin), and 2) I've yet to actually try that filtering capability myself (have yet to run the trainer).
If anybody knows how effective it really is, I'd love to hear about it.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Has anyone found a good package that they would trust to stop spam but that's easy enough for their mom to use?
I'd recommend a dose of common sense. Her email address is now useless, get her a new one, and introduce the idea of not entering her email address into every online form on the Internet. Liken it to a social security number and maybe she'll get the picture. I've been using the same email address for 5 years now and can count the number of pieces of spam I've received on no hands.
http://www.giantcompany.com/ ...i use it at home, intergrates nice with Outlook 2000 and nice and easy to use (click "Is Spam" and "Isn't Spam") but it filters a good 90% of my spam without intervention. Its had only 2 miss fires but a quick click on "Isnt Spam" and its all fixed.
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Cloudmark's Spamnet is an extremely good application for this.
http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/
The Mozilla mail client (thunderbird).
After training it for about a week, I don't think I've had one false positive, and *very* few missed.
Plus the added benefit of it being less of a security risk for her as well.
get it at SourceForge. You can set it up for her once (install winperl, etc), feed the corpus of email she's (hopefully) saved, and then the rest of the interface is - not commandline, but web based - 127.0.0.1. I get no spam anymore. 'Course, my ESP (email service prov) is pretty unknown ... get her away from yahoo, aol, attbi/comcast, etc - get a domain!
I recommend Dreamhost. They use Razor, and you can have detected spam automatically deleted if you use IMAP. If you want POP3, then you'll need to create one filter on her email client, but that's something that you can do once and then forget about.
Spambayes works great for me and my users. You have to install Python but it's all very trivial (our users do it theirselves).
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
I have my mom using McAfee's Spamkiller. (www.mcafee.com) The learning curve isn't too steep (Mom got the hang of it almost immediately) and it is remarkably effective. The first time she launched it, the default filters correctly identified 36 out of 42 messages as spam. She occasionally asks me for help with particularly pernicious spammers, and I use those opportunities to educate her on creating more effective filters. Last time I checked, Spamkiller was knocking down 98% of her spam.
Spambayes was mentioned a few months ago in .
It supports Windows, and has a plugin for Outlook. Besides the plugin, there is a web interface that is accessible from any browser.
Setting it up seems a bit difficult, but after that it should be mom-friendly.
WWTTD?
I use Popfile It's a Bayesean filter that is configured with an HTML interface. Very easy to use, and fairly accurate.
The pen is mightier than the sword...
Check out the SpamBayes Outlook Addin. It's free, and based on the open source SpamBayes Project
I just read about this in Infoworld so I haven't had a chance to evaluate it, but they gave it rather high marks.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Spammunition. It's free.
That way you simply administer anti-spam tools for her and yourself in a single step.
This may have the added bonus of a common family domain, and of course it extends to siblings, etc.
Before you do it, be sure you want to take on the responsibility of mail system management for your family. Frankly, since it's your mail too, it's likely less work than remotely administering several installations of client-side anti-spam tools.
Your best bet is to ditch the old email address and get a new one, then teach her the fundamental tenets of spam avoidance...
1) NEVER give out your email address to someone you don't know. (This includes posting on forums and sites that "require" you to register with a valid email address.)
2) Even if you think you are giving your address to a trusted source, read that Privacy Policy. Look for something like: "we do not share user data with our associates". If the policy is hard to find or isn't there, don't trust them.
3) NEVER click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
4) For those cases where you need to sign up with a non-trusted source to get information, setup an account purely for retrieving passwords and registration confirmation.
Ignorance, as is the case with pretty much everything, is the biggest problem that is easy to solve. Don't think just because she's "Mom" she can't learn these tips. My parents and grandparents both had a really bad spam problem, and by just showing them how to avoid getting spam in the first place goes far in reducing the over-all problem. (Especially when you can get them to spread the word to their friends and co-workers.)
I highly recommend Outclass! All the goodness of PopFile wrapped into an Outlook plugin. I use it as the client side filter at work, and none of our users have had a problem with it.
Thunderbird has a built-in autolearning spam filter. You just recieve your e-mail and when you see spam, mark it as such (by clicking the little 'Trash' Icon). And it is sent to the Junk folder and any future e-mail with similar structure will be blocked. As you mark e-mail as junk (or not junk) it learns and adapts. I have an almost 0% false-positive rate, and at least 95% catching rate. It uses the Bayesian algorythm.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
then you can tag or trash. tagging implies playing with outlook filters.
sf repo
also have a look at spamassasin for windows, the plug and play way
at least 3 of em
I run the email and web server that my parents use for their email account. It's a linux box that I run spam assassin on to kill spam. They both use Outlook 2000 as their IMAP client and I even set up webmail access for when they're away from their computer.
My other computer is your Windows box
works well for me.
CloudMark SpamNet.
$1.99 / month.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
You might like to try MailWasher. It's free (although there's a Pro version too).
Sneakemail and teach her to never give out her real email address to anyone. Just set up a new sneakemail address for whoever needs her address and give them that one. I have been using this for about 6 months since I got a new email address, and I still get no spam at all.
The thing that really makes it cool for me is every email you get is forwarded to your real address through sneakemail, but sneakemail puts a label on it that you enter for each address you create. So, if you start getting spam from a certain address, just got to sneakemail and delete it.
Heck, my mom doesn't even know my real address anymore.
They have a spam filtering algorithm, and it does work rather effectively. I'm not sure what they charger per month, but they do offer POP service; using Outlook won't be a problem.
I use their domain hosting service, and I very rarely get spam mail. At least 99% of it is quarantined in a folder that I might check once a month or just allow to get purged automatically.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
... since I still use the Beta version, which works perfect for me.
This beta remains free AFAIK.
For people who haven't downloaded the Beta earlier: You can find it here
Happy SpamFighting!
Reading this signature is senseless so don't do it.
Both Outlook Express and the full Outlook have a "Rules" system that let you automatically move emails around based on various criteria.
Simply set her up some rules that match on the various types of email she wants to get. In my mom's case we have a family mailing list, which I set a rule to match the subject line for. She also gets automated emails from a cooking site, and from her ISP, so I set up rules for that.
The key is each rule should simply match a type of mail she wants to keep, and have the "Stop processing rules" option checked. As soon as one of the criteria is matched, the rules stop and the mail stays in her inbox. The rule need not have any actual "action" on it, its purpose is to match and stop.
The last two rules are critical. The next to last rule should be a "Match on FROM address", and you should select EVERYONE in her address book. (And of course, set the "stop processing more rules" bit). You may have to update this rule as she adds to her address book.
The very last rule is the key. This one is only going to be processed if NONE of the others match. You simply have this rule match everything, and dump everything into a folder named "Junk Mail".
That's it. No extra software required. When I go visit her, she usually has a ton of stuff in Junk Mail, just give it a quick look to make sure there is nothing your rules are missing, and dump it for her.
P.S. If that's not geeky enough for you, I also recommend Cloudmark.
Check out Qurb. It's a whitelist-based spam filter for Outlook, and I've been using it for a couple of months with no problems. Very simple to install, setup and use.
Same here -- I've not upgraded from the last beta, and I don't plan on doing so.
I was looking for the thread in the forum pointing to the mirrors where the betas were, but I couldn't find them to put in my reply..
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Spamassasin proxy for windows which requires minimal setup and works very well for me. I was using Cloudmark's solution, but stopped when they wanted $4.99 monthly to let me keep their database up-to-date. Found their solution flawed anyway, since a lot of people seemed to believe that mailing lists they subscribed to became spam when they grew tired with them.
Is there any bayesian filter that works with Outlook Express? This is what my family uses, and I know that SpamBayes only works with Outlook. I don't think I want them to switch to Mozilla.
http://www.messagefire.com
It's not a free service, but it's really cheap, and it's got a nice user interface, designed specifically for your mom. You do have to check for false positives, because it's not perfect, but I get close to zero spam through my personal email account now that I'm using it. I wish I could use it at work.
Check out Eudora Pro and the plugin Spamnix. Both are free to use, but if you register you don't get adware or annoyances.
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
although it doesn't provide free pop3 access, Yahoo mail blocks ALL of my spam.
I use Mailwasher There is both a free version and a $29.95 pro version.
Not quite an outlook integrated product, but the learning curve is easy.
One of the nice features is that the mail is checked while still on the server, so the traffic is reduced a bit.
It's got a few nice features. The latest incarnation of the freeware version is limited to one account,and does not include Hotmail access, but older versions did not have these limitations.
Outclass is a free Outlook plugin for Popfile. It has a nice easy interface that exposes most of the functionality of popfile. Outclass directly integrates with Popfile, instead of using it as a proxy, allowing Outclass to filter any email account that Outlook supports. That includes IMAP and Exchange accounts.
IMHO, it's a definiate must-have if you use outlook.
-- I take full responsibility for the failure of the project do to my tendency to underestimate your incompetence.
The AC comment above was pretty funny too. But, then I thought he might have been serious. You never can tell on Slashdot.
Add to the above, Number 5)
Don't let other family members surf porn sites and register for sites with your email account. Probably done by a child, husband, or boyfriend using MSIE's auto-complete to fill out her email address. That's how you get the nastiest SPAM on the planet!
At least tell her to use a disposable email account for that stuff. Use it like a Kleenex...
If she's using POP3 to download her mail I can heartily recommend SAProxy which encapsulates Spamassassin as a POP3 proxy with a nice Windows installer & configuration screens.
I have not used this one but have heard great things about it: spambayes, a Python based Bayeian classifier with nice plugin for Outlook 2000/XP.
Last but not least, since Mcaffee bought Deersoft you can expect that their next version of SpamKiller should be at least as good as Spamassassin Pro was.
BalamApple's Mail.app does a good job with it's Junk mail tool. I've used it for a month and a half or so.
Now, I'm back on a PC and want a Mac again, too bad I have to save up so many pennies for one.
I would love to follow your advice no. 4, but had no luck finding a free account that would let me get mail by pop3 instead of web-interface. Any suggestions?
1)Send user spam with fake "unsubscribe" link.
2)User clicks "unsubscribe" link, verifying that he/she indeed received your e-mail at a *valid* e-mail address.
3)Send user a fuck-ton more spam.
4)Do *not* actually unsubscribe user.
5)PROFIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
Your comment applies to legitimate companies who respect and abide by a privacy policy. Given that America Online, by itself, recently blocked two billion spam mails in one day, the ratio of legit commercial mailings to spam is probably pretty damn low.
Your comment applies to legitimate companies who respect and abide by a privacy policy.
Yes. Spam mailed from countries outside the US that don't care about spam or spam mailed through proxies is going to be sent regardless of whether or not you unsubscribe. Much of that spam doesn't even pretend to have an unsubscribe link. Since they already have your email address, there isn't anything worse that can happen.
But if you want to stop legitimate companies from mailing you, or companies that have (at least somewhat) legitimately bought your address, you need to unsubscribe.
I've been using Mcafee Spamkiller for months now and I recommend it. The retail price is about $40, but I got it at Costco for $16 with a $10 rebate, so I'm happy with the price. I think my mom could use it.
Apply your own interpretation of the words and grammar in this post.
I use bogofilter with procmail and uw-imap. In the last month it's had zero false positives and only let one actual spam into my INBOX. Those numbers are a pretty typical month; I've never had a false positive (I still scan all my spam once it's sorted because I'm paranoid. I'll quit eventually). I initially trained it with about 1000 spam messages and 200 or so good ones.
Mom can't set it up initially, and it needs to be implemented on the server, which might rule it out in your situation depending on who provides her mail service. That said, at this point all I have to do is drag any miscategorized mail to the appropriate trash box. A cron job processes these mailboxes regularly and corrects any errors that I've identified.
It's effectively the same thing as having a "delete as spam" button (in fact, my mutt macros make it exactly the same), and works with every mail client without modification (Outlook (Express), Eudora, even webmail). Mom could certainly use it once it was put into place, and would probably love it as much as I do.
It's free, low maintenance (really no maintenance aside from dropping one or two miscategorized messages into the right boxes each month), amazingly accurate, tailored to the user (I have numerous bothersome newsletters that aren't technically spam but that I don't want and can't seem to unsubscribe from sorted with the spam) and highly flexible. My parents saw me using it and have been begging me for something similar.
Game... blouses.
Fetches mail from your POP server, removes the spam, let's you pickup the rest. Gives you a summary of what was filtered out. No voting. No software on your PC/Mac/*ix box. No content filters. Aimed at being usable by your relatives--not just techies.
http://www.messagefire.com/, you can use the "Trial" link to test it against the first 20 messages in your inbox.
Obligatory bias notice--I'm a partner in the company.