Some Ways To Avoid Spam On Gmail

jafo writes "In general, Gmail has been extremely spam-free. More recently, however, it's gotten dramatically worse. I've written up some thoughts on Gmail spam and keeping the spam down. Want less spam on Gmail (and likely others)? Try generating an account name using "apg -M L -t"."

Comments

My test

[FictionPimp]

I was curious about how much spam gets auto generated. I have a fairly common name so I used one of my gmail invites with my normal gmail account to make an account with my firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

I havn't used or given it out to anbody, the spam folder gets about 25 messages a day. Luckly google has done a perfect job with marking them all spam.

TOP SOFTWARE...

[rokzy]

I keep getting the same spam over and over which starts "TOP SOFTWARE...". It's mostly the only one I see and GMail recognises it as spam, but the same message keeps coming to my spambox several times a day. I wish they'd just ban it.

Re:guessing names spamming

[akadruid]

I actually forwarded my domain catch-all address to gmail because of the amount of spam bouce messages I was recieving - something in the order of 1500 per day. My Mozilla Thunderbird behind a Brightmail-filtered ISP just wasn't coping with the load so I dropped it all on gmail. It did a fantasitic job, with a few tweaks set up, and now that my spam load has died down again a bit, I'm hooked on gmail despite my love for Thunderbird.

Here's the tweaks I used

Every spam I've gotten @ gmail recently...

[artifex2004]

Spamcop reports as originally being from a "ajicccln.info" address. They're using a nameguessing system, too. I wonder why Google doesn't just block their IPs totally?

Published addresses?

[dr_d_19]

Something I'd like to know (and this isn't stated in the article) is: which of his accounts has been published somewhere on the net (or available to the public in any harvesting kind of way).

Doesn't matter if your account is simply garbage, as long as someone can spider it on the web. All honor to the dictionary attack, but as we all know, it doesn't take very long before someone finds your account on the web. Also, there are ways to prevent this.

I never have my mailto clickable, and I use combinations of images to display it.

For those without apg

[Underholdning]

Here's a sample output:

~$ apg -M L -t
irpoynno (irp-oynn-o)
padolchair (pad-olch-air)
rheyghyab (rheyg-hyab)
ledonoxi (led-on-ox-i)
hiryisso (hir-yiss-o)
ojfebthuff (oj-feb-thuff)

I don't know about you, but suggesting people selecting rheyghyab@gmail as their email address seems pretty stupid to me. Granted, spammers will have a hard time guessing it, but everybody else will have a hard time remembering it.

Best bet for anti-spam

[Danathar]

I use Jetable.org (time expiring email relay addressess) to when signing up or doing something that I might suspect might get me on a spam list. This way email get's sent to my gmail (or any other account) for a limited time and if the spammer gets a hold of the jetable email address, it just expires after a set time period. VERY useful!

And it's totally free!

http://www.jetable.org/en/index

Re:guessing names spamming

[peragrin]

Want to know a secret?? Gmail does have POP3 access. configure it from your preferences. You have to manually enable it.

Free Invites

[dahl_ag]

If you are looking for an invite, check out http://www.freegmailinvites.com/. It DOES actually work. That is where I got my gmail account. I just donated 10 new invites to the site.