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.

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

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.

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.