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Ask Slashdot: How Effective Is Your ISP's Spam Filter?

Posted by timothy on from the gmail-does-alright dept.

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.

17 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Why use ISP email? by Strider- · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...
    1. Re:Why use ISP email? by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Informative

      THIS

      There's no reason to use the email provided to you by your ISP. It's just another way to keep you locked into their services. Once upon a time, before web mail, and easily available domain names and hosting services, it made more sense to just use whatever your ISP gave you. But there is absolutely no reason to use it now, and it can actually cause a lot of problems as the OP has pointed out. Personally, I wouldn't recommend using a 3rd party Email provider at all. I would just buy my own domain name and figure out my own hosting solution for the email. Even if you just forward the email to GMail (This is what I do), you own the email address, and you don't have to worry about what happens when you want to switch the interfrace, and end up having to change your email address in the process. Many sites use your email address as your login, assuming that nobody would ever want to change their email address. Sure, GMail may be nice now, but they've shut down services in the path. I ended up switching email addresses a couple times when email services decided to close up, or just start offering really bad service. I don't ever want to have to switch email addresses again.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Why use ISP email? by Anna+Merikin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Why use ISP email? by frovingslosh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    4. Re:Why use ISP email? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I highly doubt gmail is going anywhere soon. Next to search, it's their most profitable business. It would almost be like saying "Google search may not be around much longer."

    5. Re:Why use ISP email? by Shaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Getting a malware attachment by email has NOTHING AT ALL to do with their server. If someone had hacked their server and was doing it, then fine... but the two issues do not go hand in hand in any way.

      --
      ...Steve
    6. Re:Why use ISP email? by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.

      There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?

    7. Re:Why use ISP email? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re:Why use ISP email? by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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!
    9. Re:Why use ISP email? by David_Hart · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.

      There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?

      I pay for my own domain and external hosting. It has Spam Assassin on it and gets about 40% of the spam. I have GMail configured to pull in my email from that account. GMail's spam filter gets the other 59% of spam. I set up Gmail to send as my personal email address instead of my gmail address. This way I have my own domain and I get to take advantage of Gmail's spam filter.

      The one thing that sucks about the set-up is that Gmail has a randomized timer that polls external accounts based on some algorithm and it can sometimes take 30 minutes for email to show up. To get around this I set up both accounts on most of my devices so that I can check my email server if the message isn't in Gmail.

  2. Did you mean to submit this to SlashDot? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >> 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.)

  3. No filter is truly effective by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Google by Kernel+Kurtz · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use both Gmail and Google Apps for my own domain email and their spam filtering is very good.

    1. Re: Google by lurker412 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, maybe. What I know is that I don't see much spam even in my spam folder, which does suggest that Gmail may be blowing a lot of stuff away before I have any chance to see it. OTOH, I don't ever recall a case of learning later that something legitimate had been deleted instead of put into my spam folder, and the number of false positives there is tiny. My overall impression is that their filtering system is very effective. I haven't seen a true spam message in my inbox for years and don't even think of it as a problem anymore.

  5. Your ISP doesn't care by Maxwell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  6. Spamassassin and Greylisting.. by popoutman · · Score: 3, Informative
    Up to date spamassassin and well configured greylisting works very well for my email solution. The most spam mail comes in on mailing lists that deliberately have differing settings on them. Plus I have spam and ham training active. Rare enough to get spam into my actual inbox these days.

    I've also got very little spam on my Gmail address as well..

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    - This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
  7. No filter is perfect but many are very effective by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.