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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"."
I receive some spam every day on my GMail account and, looking at the headers, it seems that the spammers are randomly generating the email addresses and my address, eventually, gets generated and receives spam. Fortunately, the GMail spam filter has successfully caught all of the spam.
I signed up for gmail, and after logging into the account about four times, and having sent all of maybe a dozen emails, all of which went to personal friends, started receiving spam messages. Currently it's a trickle, something under 1 spam message per day, and they've all been caught by gmail's spam filter, but for some reason I still find it annoying to see ANY spam. I don't get spam at all on my fastmail accounts, and have been using them as my everyday mail account for better than a year now.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
For an account name, apg is fine. For passwords, I've created a far more flexible system which I distribute with documentation describing password generation from my site.
The key to good password generation is allowing the user to describe how it's to be done. This increases the ability to memorize passwords and makes it harder for an attacker to guess.
To that end, I have created a sort of reverse regular expression syntax where you describe the password to the program using general patterns. Try it out.
Get an email address from here:
m nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/
http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijkl
most spammers won't think you're serious.
I think by nature, spam gets more and more like real messages. This means that eventually all spam filtering becomes ineffective. Someone could probably make a research paper out of this.
Well I got a GMail account especially so I can use it to sign up to bulletin boards, forums and to use when I order stuff over the web etc. etc.
That way all the spam I get should start going to my GMail account thereby leaving my real email account (hosted on my home server) free for me to use with friends and family etc. (It's been 100% spam free in the nine months I've been using it)
Previously I'd been using a "throwaway" domain name I bought specially for this (which gets redirected to a real account) but it's due for expiry soon and, now I have a GMail account, it can go ! So my top tip of the week is get several free web mail accounts and use them for everything but your private stuff.
And on this note I'd never use my GMail account for any private stuff as, fer fecks sake, they're a SEARCH company. How long do you think it'll be before their new corporate shareholder overlords start doing some real intensive data mining on all your GMails ?
"But dude, their motto is do no evil" I hear you squeak. Sorry, they're a publically listed company and will do whatever "the market" tells them to do...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
The false positives is becoming an increasing problem for me also. I use GMail for mailing-lists, and more of the messages from those lists are now falling foul of the GMail spam-filters. The lists which show particular failures in this regard are debian-user and vim-user.
I had hoped that there would be some way of keeping those messages from the GMail filter, but of course there isn't one. Bizarrely enough, the system was much better at the false-positives, it seems to have gotten worse as the volume of actual spam has mounted. There doesn't appear to be any consistency in those identified as spammers.
I did note, however, in a recent thread on debian-user, that a supposed troll's emails consistently went into the spam-bucket. Perhaps GMail uses other users 'Mark as Spam' returns and automatically assigns spam-values on that basis?
add a filter. I've found that a dozen or so well chosen filters takes care of 90% of spam. The best part is that it only takes a few seconds to write one and it's good forever.
A couple of tips:
- you almost always want to have "...and sender is not in my address book" as part of the filter expression.
- For definite spam, I set the actions as "delete" AND "delete from server". This is particularly useful for webmail or other non-archiving clients. In my case I check my email from both Windows and Linux but only archive under Linux. (T-Bird for both FWIW).
Good to know that I'm not the only one getting this crap. I was already wondering how they got my username (as I gave the address only to my friends) but this confirms that they're using dictionary/random character attacks...
I'd have to agree. So far, my gmail account gets far more false positives than my yahoo mail and even hotmail.
Hopefully they'll upgrade to a working bayesian system because despite the fact that I use the "not spam" button all the time, it still consistently marks the same type of messages as spam.