It's driving me nuts. It has come to the point that if I ever get face to face with a spammer, I will probably rip his head off.

I haven't really counted them yet, but I guess I receive between 2,000-2,500 spam emails per day. Mind you, up until about 4 years ago, I received no spam.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: between 2,000-2,500 spam emails per day.

Your SO Loved!!

Whata ##!!

basicly, none.
you obviously need a spam filter.
my previous one, which worked very good, was Norton Internet Security. but, the package overall slowed the computer down WAY to much, escpecially boot-up. I am sure the newer version is much better - this was Norton Internet Security 2003
my current one, is just plain old Outlook 2003. it has a pretty decent spam filter built right in. and then I use Norton Anitvirus.

probably 50/day

At my personal address I receive one or two daily, and they're almost always shuttled in to Thunderbird's "junk" folder. It took a bit to train its junk mail filter, but I can't remember the last time I encountered a false positive.

At work, 50-200 a day. Fortunately most of them are trapped by a filter on the server.

quote Originally posted by Pyrthian: you obviously need a spam filter.

Problem is that I don't think that's really a solution. It won't stop the ever growing stream of spam mails. A spam filter just prevents them from being seen by me, but they will still arrive at my mailbox and I will still have to download them from the mailserver.

I get about 150 to 200 junk email's a day. My outlook just put them in another folder.

Well, ever since Uranus (or is it Neptune? Well, It's one of those cold distant gas bags) signed me up for every Democratic and liberal web site on the net my spam has doubled.

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: Problem is that I don't think that's really a solution. It won't stop the ever growing stream of spam mails. A spam filter just prevents them from being seen by me, but they will still arrive at my mailbox and I will still have to download them from the mailserver.

this is true. but I dont think you'd want an outside bot zapping emails before the even reached your server. there is always the "lost" email, which gets found in the spam folder.

for awhile, I would forward all my spam to random ".gov" email addresses. all this did was get my email address on blacklists.....

it seems you are looking for a solution that keeps you from getting spam in the first place. highly unlikely. just get a spam filter.

Our family email address gets about 30 spams a day and 2 pieces of real email, probably because my mother signs up for every mailing list for every site she shops at (and those 30 spams don't count those!). My Hotmail account gets only 1 piece/month though.

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1984 Fiero SE

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: It's driving me nuts. It has come to the point that if I ever get face to face with a spammer, I will probably rip his head off. I haven't really counted them yet, but I guess I receive between 2,000-2,500 spam emails per day. Mind you, up until about 4 years ago, I received no spam.

AAAhhh!! That explains why I haven't received a reply from you yet did you chuck mine out too?
Nick

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fierofetish.PFF'S self-confessed Snowbird!!

Growing old is harder than growing up.
Responsibility: the solution for our World's Dilemmas..
Yahoo messenger:nickcannspain
MSN Messenger-nicholascann@hotmail.com

I am wondering if the callenge/ response spam blockers such as spamarrest would be benificial?
http://www.spamarrest.com/

I stopped using my isp assigned email account a year or two ago and went gmail full time. Works just as well as an isp account, can be set up with outlook just like any other account.

I get almost no spam in the inbox now. The spam I do get goes to the junk folder that I never look at anyway and is automatically deleted in a few days, Spam doesn't count against the gmail 2766mb free inbox quota and even if it did I would never need that much space for email anyway.

web based email is the way to go. Let them figure out how to eliminate the crap. They're hosting your space so it is in their interest to keep your need for said space to a minimum.

I usually get about a dozen spam mails each day. Many of them are the same thing.
I just click through and delete them.

That's not counting the ones that earthlink catches before they get to me.

Personally, I think spammers ought to be poked through the temple with an ice pick.

As much as I'd like to do that, what I really think would stop all the spam would be a 1.5 cent charge to your account for every address you send an email to.
That would be offset by a 1.25 cent credit to your account for every email you receive. The other 1/4 cent would go to the ISP to cover the cost of administering the whole thing.

If the bastards had to pay you to receive all their garbage, they'd be sending a lot less of it.
Those of us who only send a few emails per day would hardly notice it.
And it would discourage all of those damned chain letter emails that end with, "Send this to everyone in your address list or your d!ck will fall off" letters.

quote Originally posted by Raydar: As much as I'd like to do that, what I really think would stop all the spam would be a 1.5 cent charge to your account for every address you send an email to. That would be offset by a 1.25 cent credit to your account for every email you receive. The other 1/4 cent would go to the ISP to cover the cost of administering the whole thing.

I'd be making $15 a month for doing nothing

quote Originally posted by Raydar: As much as I'd like to do that, what I really think would stop all the spam would be a 1.5 cent charge to your account for every address you send an email to. That would be offset by a 1.25 cent credit to your account for every email you receive. The other 1/4 cent would go to the ISP to cover the cost of administering the whole thing.

Exactly. Spam "works" because it costs next to nothing to distribute. For a little bit of time and a lot less money, you can distribute junk to an inconceiveably large audience. All a spammer needs in return, is one or two "hits" and they're in the black.

I don't see spam stopping unless it becomes almost completely unprofitable, whether through distribution costs or (successful) prosecution.

I proably have a similar problem to you Cliff. I own multiple domains so I have a lot of email addresses. I average about 700 a day. Thankfully about 500 of them get spam filtered. But as you say, still have to download them.

A lot. I have spam software running on the servers, but I have tons of domain catchalls running which always seems to "catch" some..

I find the spammers are starting to get smarter now.. lately there is a neew type out there that loads images from a remote server, which then may haave a script running to mass check to see what emails loaded this image. Then they have a list of valid emails.
SAMPLE:

what i find is that almost all the spam i get is not addressed to me, but something similar to my email address. for exampl, if my address is 86fierofun@something.com, I would get spam sent to 86fun@something.com, fierofun@something.com and the like. I don't know what's up with that.

quote Originally posted by 86fierofun: what i find is that almost all the spam i get is not addressed to me, but something similar to my email address. for exampl, if my address is 86fierofun@something.com, I would get spam sent to 86fun@something.com, fierofun@something.com and the like. I don't know what's up with that.

That is called a dictionary attack.

The spammers will try everything@domain.com since they know a few will reach some valid emails.

If your host is running linux with exim, they can add a line into their config that helps stop these.

The authorities really need to crack down on the spammers. There are several big time operators running the software, rolex watches, enlargement and pharma sites that could be shut down and publicly prosecuted. That would clear up alot of spam. The adult entertainment industry needs to tighten up their very lax affiliate sign up procedures, spammers currently have no problem spamming for adult sites with the easy referal rules.

Too bad Bluefrog went under in the DOS attack by an upset spammer, I really believe that I have the right to complain to the company that is being spammed for. Too bad that the spammers employ an army of "spam bot computers" the "toll charge" would be a good idea until someone found a work around.

Love to say more but I'm at work, got to go.

Cliff:

I operate my own SMTP mail server, and I use a combination of DNS blacklist (DNSBL) filtering at the server and whitelist filtering at each client to combat spam. I do not employ any more sophisticated anti-spam techniques. Summary data for one month's server blacklist performance is shown below:

--------------------------------------------------------------

Mail log Analysis for Aug/Sep 2006

           Total       DNSBL    DNSBL
 Date    Received     Reject     Pass

Aug 20      453         389        64    (partial day)
Aug 21      478         416        62
Aug 22      479         403        76
Aug 23      468         389        79
Aug 24      589         515        74
Aug 25      403         347        56
Aug 26      262         218        44
Aug 27      555         496        59
Aug 28      613         541        72
Aug 29      494         419        75
Aug 30      372         298        74
Aug 31      381         333        48
Sep  1      612         545        67
Sep  2      573         525        48
Sep  3      319         288        31
Sep  4      449         395        54
Sep  5      519         460        59
Sep  6      407         337        70
Sep  7      798         742        56
Sep  8      306         218        88
Sep  9      332         292        40
Sep 10      398         349        49
Sep 11      200         140        60
Sep 12      219         166        53
Sep 13      119          72        47
Sep 14      351         293        58
Sep 15      351         262        89
Sep 16      310         269        41
Sep 17      434         390        44
Sep 18      402         294       108
Sep 19      344         276        68
Sep 20      580         508        72
Sep 21      294         242        52
Sep 22      223         204        19    (partial day)
------   ------      ------     -----
Total    14,087      12,031     2,056
         (100%)       (85%)     (15%)
            ^           ^         ^
          Total       DNSBL     DNSBL
        Received     Reject      Pass

Rejects by blacklist provider (in submission order):

1 - spamhaus.org     8,818    (73%)
2 - sorbs.net        1,187    (10%)
3 - njabl.org        2,026    (17%)
                     ------
                     12,031   (100%)

--------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see, 85% of the e-mail received by my server is from known spam sources. You can also see that there is a lot of variability in the amount of spam from day to day. Of the remaining 15% that passes the blacklist filtering, about 2/3 is spam from new sources that are not yet blacklisted, and most of these are caught by the whitelist filtering (qurb) that I use on my M$ Windows clients. Bottom line ... only about 5% of the e-mail arriving at my server is legitimate!

A significant proportion of the spam I receive seems to be due to two causes: 1) policy, leakage, or theft from an old Yahoo discussion list that I haven't visited in years but Yahoo won't let me de-register from, or 2) leakage or theft from a domain registration many years ago at Network Solutions. In your case, I imagine that some of the spam you receive is courtesy of the same sociopaths who have attempted to hack PFF in the past.

As an aside, note the pronounced drop in spam on September 11, 12, and 13. I wonder why. Could it perhaps be related to the anniversary of September 11, 2001? Could it perhaps be tangible evidence of anti-terrorism countermeasures related to that anniversary?

I hope this provides some useful information. YMMV. (You did ask, "How much?" didn't you?)

[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 09-23-2006).]

quote Originally posted by Marvin McInnis: I operate my own SMTP mail server, and I use a combination of DNS blacklist (DNSBL) filtering at the server

How does that work (since I run my own mailserver as well)? What do I need to install serverside?

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: ... where did you get that overview from? Do you have some kind of script that examines the mail.log?

It's a rather simple Linux bash shell script that I wrote for just this purpose; all of the heavy lifting is done by grep. If you want a copy, just send me the e-mail address you prefer I use. I will also send you a copy of the relevant entries from my sendmail.mc file if you'd like to see them.

Hint: Use the sorbs.net blacklist with caution. They will sometimes blacklist one of a big ISP's many mail servers and then try to extort (my words) a "fine" from the ISP before they will delist it. This can result in rejection of some, but not all, e-mail from an AOL customer (for example) ... depending upon which of AOL's servers happens to handle a particular message. Very frustrating. It is for that reason that I no longer use the sorbs "spam" blacklist, although they have other blacklists that I still do use.

[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 09-23-2006).]

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: It's driving me nuts. It has come to the point that if I ever get face to face with a spammer, I will probably rip his head off. I haven't really counted them yet, but I guess I receive between 2,000-2,500 spam emails per day. Mind you, up until about 4 years ago, I received no spam.

Thats about what i average too.

However, until the spammers started un-teaching the spam filters this summer 99% of it was caught and i never had to actually SEE it. Now with the un-training they are doing, day by day what ends up in my inbox to see increases.

quote Originally posted by Nurb432: Thats about what i average too. However, until the spammers started un-teaching the spam filters this summer 99% of it was caught and i never had to actually SEE it. Now with the un-training they are doing, day by day what ends up in my inbox to see increases.

My Earthlink address gets spammed, so I turned up the settings as high as they get. I don't get any spam anymore Well, at least I don't see it.

[This message has been edited by moleman_in_a_FieroGT (edited 09-22-2006).]

I receive about 1-2 a day, I don't have a spam filter or anything...just a unique email address .

quote Originally posted by 5.0Vert: I receive about 1-2 a day ....

We can fix that!

[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 09-22-2006).]

I have a system. It seems to work. I have several different e-mail addresses, according to function. 1 I've had for about 7 years now, it gets maybe 1-2 spams a day. That's total, including filter. Its never posted on the web, used to sign up for anything, its only an e-mail I give to contacts. I have another that I've signed up for every single thing for for the past 5 years. It gets about 50-75 a day. I don't even check it, except for occassions right after I sign up for something when the password is sent to that e-mail. Another I use for friends and other stuff, more like 10 a day, another is business only, it gets 15 or so a day, I just got a new e-mail address with our local fiero club and so far it gets none. Of course, it's only been around for a few weeks .

[This message has been edited by Tinton (edited 09-23-2006).]