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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.
Uhmmm, why are you using your ISP's email in the first place? It's far better to use a third party email provider, so that you can switch ISPs at will without having to change your email address.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
>> my ISP is Verizon and the Verizon spam filter
Not too many people 'round here are dumb enough to use their ISP as their email provider. Fix that problem first. (Closes ticket.)
Don't tie your email account to your ISP. Decide how you are going to get your email independently, then your ISP is just the pipe.
Two benefits:
- You can change your pipe without causing problems- your email address doesn't change
- You have a lot more options for email providers than most people have options for ISPs.
I didn't even know my ISP had a spam filter. I have spam filters on my accounts and the junk folder fills up constantly. In fact, my ISP is one of the worst spam offenders, sending me constant offers for great deals if I just sign up for their cable TV and other "special deals".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't fool yourself on this one.
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
You cannot win with filters, period.
The truth of the matter - that a lot of people seem to either not be aware of or not be concerned with - is that spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send out spam to piss you off, they send it out to make money. No amount of filtering or criminal prosecution will change that; in fact it generally just increases the total volume of spam that traverses the internet continuously. We all pay for this spam to be transmitted, stored, processed, downloaded, etc, even if we never buy any spamvertised product. We pay for it in that it increases the consumption of internet bandwidth, it increases the consumption of storage at ISPs, and has other downstream impacts as well
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else - not even the sum total of all the filters ever installed worldwide - has had an impact even remotely near it.
Stop thinking about filters an start thinking about solutions.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I use both Gmail and Google Apps for my own domain email and their spam filtering is very good.
They would much rather you join the 21st century and use any email service except theirs. Take the hint, choose Microsoft or Google and move on...
When I operated an ISP we had an absurdly effective mail filtering system. 2000 users in the domain, on average 1,000,000 spam messages blocked per day (the owner had sold the customer mail list several times (somuchate)). This required LOTS of work and honestly wasn't worth the effort.
I've had a GMail acct since 2004, haven't had an issue since. Left that ISP job, been through 2 other ISPs since then. Haven't had to change anything about external accounts, still have mail archival going back over a decade now and very few spam messages get through, very few legit emails blocked.
I've also got very little spam on my Gmail address as well..
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
Boy, the number of comments has really fallen on all stories since Dice's last "upgrade."
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
Disagree. I have used gmail for quite a while and I very rarely see spam outside of the spam folder. This has been the case for many years now. I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore. When one does slip through I just flag it and the problem goes away. Spam effectively almost doesn't exist for me. While I do agree that no filter is perfect it isn't that hard to have one that is highly effective. With enough people flagging spam filters can be very useful in automating spam removal. It doesn't entirely solve the problem but it has made it manageable.
You cannot win with filters, period.
I have no illusions that I am going to eliminate spam entirely. The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem. So far nobody has come up with a credible and effective solution and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Like everybody else is saying -- Why are you using your ISP's email? They should only be your pipe. I personally stopped using any ISP's email in the 90's... It was after the first switch over that I figured this problem out.
Originally I ran my own domain and spam filtering. I was on the first batch of first spam from those lawyers. Fuckers. Anyway...
Have since migrated domain email to Google apps -- not free anymore for you unfortunately, but on a user @gmail.com basis is still very free.
For speed Google wins -- never even came close to matching their speed for users with gigs and gigs of email they refuse to delete. Not that I'm one to talk.
Their spam filtering beats anything I've seen. I always had too many false positives on my setup; Google has really had one problem in the last decade with that -- false positives from the COPIERS (they have their own accounts and in the domain mailing to same domain users). Annoyingly I had to add a filter to each user to fix that problem.
Otherwise their spam filters are dead nuts on for me. One, maybe two spam messages will hit my Inbox in any given year. My account will @ the .com variant of the domain will get 2-5,000 spams a DAY...
Use Google.
I see a lot of comments here telling the OP to settup his own domain, email service and spam filter. That's a lot of work and cost. Since the OP is using ISP mail, he probably isn't wanting to go the full monty route being proposed by most respondents. Yahoo mail works pretty good. At least as far as spam filtering is concerned. I get a couple a week maybe, if that. Very few false positives as well.
That's great unless, for anyone of a number of reasons, you don't want to be thatgeek@college.edu for the rest of your life.
What free e-mail address? My university canned all my accounts several years after I finally got around to graduating. That's a lot of overhead for them to have to deal with I wouldn't expect that to live forever.