Slashdot Mirror
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"."
My postman is such a putz - ever since I subscribed to the 'slashdot postal catalogue', he has [rather cunningly] worked out that I read slashdot.
... then he drives off laughing like an idiot - it is very annoying and I would like it to stop - can anyone give me some advice?
Now, since that my address is 1 Aardvark Avenue, Australia; I am the first person that gets his mail delivered off the truck.
So just as I go out the door on my way to work, he drives up - delivers my mail (very dramatically) and yells "FIRST POST"
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
and then you end up with an email address that you have to keep written on a post-it stuck to your monitor so you can remember it.
I have absolutely NO spam on my gmail account. Why? Because my email address is l1OO0100lO1l100lO1l01@gmail.com. Or 1O00100lO1l1O0lO110l@gmail.com. Or 100O100lOl11O0lO110l@gmail.com... I forget which. But that's an implementation detail; the important point is that I get absolutely no spam!
I have a couple gmail acounts. The spam they get, and its not alot so far, seems to be guess the name type. The name in the "to" field is close but not exactly my address. I think gmail just delivers it but marks it instantly as spam so the spammers don't know which are "live" addresses and which are non existant ones.
just my experience..
Its going to get worse though. As more people use it and when it goes out of beta and some spammers can start getting accounts and testing...
Heck I have a domain with one email addess (which is a catch all). I've never ever given out the address, yet I get spam there... Lots of it.
Its making email so much less usefull
Just don't use 'effin Gmail! GAH! Just because everyone and their cat has 50 gmail invites to give out doesn't mean that you have to use it.
SpamAssassin is catching nearly 100% of the spam bound for my regular personal email account. I don't need Google's help with that.
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.
Sure, it's "tiasi54ffcb44334bcvxw53ezz3wr@gmail.com," that is t as in this, r as in really, i as in is, a, s as in stupid, i as in idea...
Hey, I wanted this gmail adress... dammit, the good names are always gone when I want to register something...
I don't need a signature.
It's a well written article, but I don't feel it brings anything new to the discussion. Yes, spammers were eventually going to target GMail because of it's popularity, but there isn't really any detailed information in the article as to how Google is defending itself, merely a lot of (interesting) specualtion.
And while the same techniques are used to try and stop spammers from finding your account, there aren't any gmail specific ideas, which is what I hoped I would find int he article.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
"Want less spam on Gmail (and likely others)? Try generating an account name using apg -M L -t""."
This helps to get less email from your friends as well.
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.
I have two gmail accounts. One is myl33tusername@gmail - the other is firstname.lastname@gmail. Guess what - the latter is now swamped with spam. Granted, gmail properly files them all in the spam folder, but it shows that the spammers are already firing off massive dictionary attacks on gmail.
Underholdning.info
The evidence is empirical. The conclusions are common sense. I'm surprised the article doesn't talk about False Positives, the bane of spam filtering. I usually sign up for a few mailing lists, and then create filters to automatically archive them. Recently, a lot of my mailing list traffic has been marked as Spam, even though my filter specifically says to archive all mail from the list.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
Get an email address from here:
m nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/
http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijkl
most spammers won't think you're serious.
Is apg digitally signed?
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.