Science Forums 2

[Buffy]

One of my clients has a public e-mail address that's been published in her books and its on every spam list in creation. I don't even know how many total spams it gets per day (its probably about 1000/day based on a few tests), but the server spam filters which currently are totally sucky--SmarterMail if you want to know, the new version has SpamAssassin integrated with it (which I love, more below)--still seems to get about 80% of the spam, leaving (estmate here) average about 200 spams per day getting marked as "questionable". I've got content filters that I actively monitor (worth it because I can copy them to a bunch of customers to keep their spam down), that handle about 70% of what's left, still resulting in about 30 per day that need to be looked at. But virtually all of these are the CAPTCHA/stock-pump-n-dump spam mails that are really just about impossible to filter. This for an address that gets one legitimate--but valuable--e-mail per *month*.

SpamAssassin is really good, and the accounts I have that use it get almost no spam any more, although by coincidence, these are the addresses that are for some reason *not* on the CAPTCHA/stockscam lists, so I don't know how well it works on those.

I'll admit to being a dinosaur on mail client: I'm still using Outlook 2000 (ducks flames from alexander).... I do recommend Thunderbird to everyone though...

What continues to amaze me is that the stockscam thing actually seems to work: its not just the evidence that they still send the spam, its kind of fun to watch what happens to these penny stocks that *skyrocket* after the spam goes out. I guess some people think they can beat the "surge" on the way up...

Advocates death penalty for spammers,
Buffy