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De-spamming Your Inbox The Hard Way
ajain writes "Even after using precautions like dummy email address in public forums, I have been plagued by the spam mails for long time now. Accidentally, I hit upon a not-so-elegant but effective solution recently: Ever thought of shutting down the mail server temporarily to stop spam to your inbox permanently? Well, it seems to work. In my case, a two-day shutdown resulted in 97.5% decrease in spam traffic! Here are the details and a step-by-step guide to this desperate-method of spam reduction. I think I'll model, simulate and then optimize the amount of shut-down time required for spam levels to drop to zero!"
I personally use alternate email aliases on my mail server that forward to my real account. then, once every couple of months, I delete those aliases and create new ones to post to websites, or use when I sign up for something. Only close personal friends get my real address, and if spam ever does show up directly at that address, I attack the spammer in every way possible. (spamcop, the spam fcc email address, etc)
Seems to work fine for me, and I can keep my mail server up 24/7.
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
..perhaps won't slow the flow of spam but will let you know who that bastards are that are selling your email in the first place. Buy a domain name then use a different email address of every site that asks for an email.. for example 'amazon_email@yourdomain.com' if you fill in a form at amazon.com.
You'd be suprised at the sites that promise to protect privacy and don't.
Just a thought.
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Speaking of attacking in every way possible, I'm surprised some group of "white hat hackers" hasn't come up with a DDOS spammer attack bot, kind of like the Lycos screensaver. This is something that couldn't be done by a corporation for liability reasons, but I doubt the FBI or other law enforcement groups are going to care if people are DDOSing known spamming networks. Even better, the spammers can't sue anyone unless they want a class action countersuit on behalf of those spammed.
Our Postfix mail server uses Postgrey (click link for graph showing effectiveness), and it's as close to 'magic' as I've seen yet in the antispam category.
-Mark
Our ISP has set up a slightly more elegant way to fliter out lots and lots of spam. They call it DoubleVerify.
From the FAQ (http://www.olympus.net/doubleVerifyNL):
DoubleVerify gets two chances to automatically identify mail. When mail arrives at our mail server the first time our server requests the sending mail server to send it a second time. Spammers rarely comply. Legitimate mail servers typically resend the mail about fifteen minutes later. Once OlympusNet receives mail the second time, it immediately delivers that mail and continues to immediately deliver mail from that sender. The DoubleVerify process works invisibly and is handled automatically by the mail servers.
You can whitelist entire domains (like your company, for example), too. It's worked pretty well for us.
Actually if you own a domain. Simply use abuse@yourdomainhere.com as your e-mail address. You will never receive any spam. I know this is not practical for most people but it works flawlessly.
During that time, all the mails sent to my mail account were of course bouncing.
Of course they were NOT. During that time, emails sent to your account were being held at the sending server, or, in the case of spammers who aren't using open relays, there was a timeout during the connection to port 25 on your server. Neither results in a bounce. Most intelligent email systems are set up with a 5 day queue.
In other words, it will take 5 days for bounces to start being sent. That's for real email. For the spam, the bounces will be sent to fake addresses and the spammers will never see them.
I've had systems in place on many of my accounts for YEARS that bounce (reject with "unknown user" errors) spam and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. I've waatched the mail logs on my domain's servers where 99% of the incoming email is undeliverable spam (it ALL bounces) and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. Spammers simply either DO NOT CARE if they get a bounce, or do not see the bounces anyway.
There must be a different explanation for the reduction in spam. A new spam filter on the server, for example. Spammers seeing bounces and stopping is patently ridiculous.
I have experianced first hand the repercussions of forged from fields. For a while (and probably still i was getting many message undeliverable emails and people asking to be taken off my list when a random user at my domain was being used as the from address in spam. The hundreds of emails i got a day forced me to turn off the catch all address, and recently i got notified of a complaint about my domain by my school. Has anyone else had this happen, and how can you deal with this?
You gotta be kidding. First of all, if it gets "bounced" back to some non-existent e-mail address, spammers don't get no word 'bout nothin'. Second even if it gets bounced back to spammers, they don't care. Many (most) of them are getting email lists from some spam-address distributor, so they don't see themselves as custodians of the list; they just blast away like drunks with diarrhea.
How do I know this? I've owned my domain since 1996, and I've been administrating the email since 1998. I get spam nearly every single day for beth@ahab.com (no point in cloaking it, really), and it has NEVER been a valid address. It often bounces back to the postmaster (me) after not bouncing back to their forged yahoo address and after NOT getting the word out to a single baby-eating spammer (you do know they eat babies, right?), and I see it when I bother scanning my postmaster folder for anything interesting.
Sure, it's worth my hassle if it bounces back to them, but it's probably not worth it to the poor sucker whose yahoo address they forged.
Get a clue: SPAMMERS DON'T CARE. You're kinda hoping that the guy who lets his dog shit on the sidewalk in front of your house is going to be annoyed by the smell.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.