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Ask Slashdot: How Effective Is Your ISP's Spam Filter?
An anonymous reader writes with the question in the title: does your ISP do a decent job culling spam? The reason I'm asking is that my ISP is Verizon and the Verizon spam filter is next to useless. It only blocks 15% of spam while also blocking 5% of legitimate emails. I've tried calling Verizon support a couple of times and the experience is about as pleasant and productive as banging my head on a wall. At this point I think my best move is to change ISP, but before I go around changing my email address at probably dozens of web sites I'd like to be sure that a new ISP would actually be better.
Some years back, I used a small, local ISP. I once got an email from them including an attachment (.exe). Being on a linux box, I opened it, to find it was malware (and the message was SPAM -- someone had cracked their servers).
Do not use an ISP's email and don't even correspond with them. Pay them for their bits and be done with them.
Absolutely. The two important questions here are why use an ISP's email and why use Verizon? While it would be wrong to talk someone out of dumping Verizon for any reason, no matter who you use for an ISP it is nice to have a better email service and not be dependent on your ISP for email. As this post indicates, you are hesitating to dump your ISP because of the hassle of changing an email address that all of your contacts already have. If you were using a third party email then you could change your ISP provider whenever needed without having to change anything with email.
And in addition to getting a real email account that is free of any ISP, I could also suggest that you use a free forwarding service such as spamgourmet.com. That will let you give out a unique email address to every commercial contact that insists on an email address and even to each of your friends. When spam hits you can just close down the targeted forwarding service addresses rather than abandoning the entire main address, and you can easily see which organization that you gave an email address to is sharing or leaking your information to Russian Porn Spammers and pill pushers. Knowing who leaked your email can be surprising and extremely helpful.
Even giving a unique email address to each friend is a good idea. That way if one of them clicks on something stupid ad exposed their entire address book to spammers, the spammers only get an address that you can disable, not your real email address. And if you decide that you want to change email providers, you are free to do so without the hassle of notifying everyone about the email change, you just need to update your record at the forwarding service.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Depends on the ISP, don't you think? I work for an ISP that sells e-mail as a separate service. If you're in the service area of a suitable provider, then you can buy e-mail service without subscribing to any network connection service, anyways, so it doesn't matter if you switch ISPs.
We're not "giving e-mail service away"; we are not Gmail. If you want a free/gratis mail service with all their disadvantages (and advantages) such as larger attachments and more theoretically allowed disk space with the disadvantages of lack of professional on-call management and no phone number to call which a competent human will answer, or no option for hands-on assistance from a human being if something major goes wrong with your service or account, or you get stuck, then go over there to one of the major search engines for free webmail by all means.
E-mail is a complex application which is totally separate from network connectivity and requires application-specific management for reliable operation. Why should the two services ever be treated as if they were part of the same? They're totally different services.
If reliable e-mail access and delivery is of the umpost importance to you, then you should self-host, or use a paid account with an ISP or hosting provider. Because it's definitely a better idea than using a free Hotmail account.
There is also a totally different set of skills and experience required from professionals implementing and maintaining e-mail systems, from maintaining a network.
There's no reason you should not be able to switch ISPs but keep your e-mail and DNS hosting, if you want.
Of course you still have to pay the hosting bill to some provider, and it's probably somewhere between $120 and $150 per mailbox. If you purchased your own domain name and hosted e-mail under that domain, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to take e-mail service to any willing host.
A cheap VPS plus a domain name would also be more than adequate for hosting your own email, or even a low power ARM based machine running at home on the end of your DSL assuming you have a static ip and an ISP that doesn't filter SMTP traffic.
As for spam filtering, a filter that's dedicted to you will usually be more effective too as it can learn about the email *You* typically receive... A lot of spam is sent around in languages like russian and chinese, but if you can't read these languages then chances are you will never receive any legitimate email written in these languages... A major email provider cannot block entire languages because they might have customers who speak those languages, but a mail server dedicated to one person can easily and reasonably do so.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!