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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?"
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/
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
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.
I upgraded to the Bayesian version of SpamAssassin as part of my regular maintenance. I didn't train it at all. It works great. If false positives are such a problem why not lower the bar on what gets into your inbox? I just save all my spam to a Spam folder and check it every once in a while (using IMAP). This works great for me and I can catch the occasional false positive. I've had maybe one or two in the last year and neither of them was particularly important emails. They were short notes that got flagged.
This in combination with the Mozilla mail client's Bayesian filter, which is easy to train, works wonderful. It would be cool to have Mozilla's Bayesian filter share its input with SpamAssassin.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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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.
This is not particularly helpful, unless she happens to sign up for an ISP no one has ever heard of. Most major spammers use alphabet attacks to send to every possible combo of letters and numbers @ [name your popular ISP], so even brand new addresses at AOL will get spam in no time. The online form entries are, I'd suspect, only a very small part of the problem.
Professor Jonathan Ezor
Director, Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology
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.
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.
Balam