Spam has reached epidemic proportions, and it's time we did
something more than just delete it.
Spamhaus estimates
that 76% of all email is unsolicited bulk email (UBE or spam), and many
ISPs offer some level of spam filtering before inbound messages reach
your mailbox.
That helps, but it's far from enough. I have about a dozen email
accounts - some with commercial ISPs, some free webmail accounts, and
some on servers run by our site hosts. Several of these email addresses
have never been posted anywhere on the Net, yet all of them receive
spam.
I've used different approaches to deal with spam over the years. For
quite a while, I used POPmonitor 2
to log into a dozen different email accounts, sort the stored messages
several different ways (by spam flag, by date, by size, by sender, and
by subject), deleting hundreds of emails from some mailboxes every
day.
After that, I'd download my email and have Claris Emailer,
PowerMail, and Apple's Mail filter the incoming messages. With the
first two programs, I cobbled together my own spam filters. With Mail,
I used Apple's junk mail filter, which took a while to train.
None of these approaches was more than about 98% effective in
flagging spam.
SpamSieve
Some time ago I downloaded SpamSieve, installed it,
configured it with Emailer and Mail, and turned off Apple's junk mail
filter. Within a week it was filtering spam more effectively than
Apple's filter had after months of use. Registering this $25 shareware
app was a no-brainer.
I'm still using SpamSieve, and it's accurately identifying well over
99% of incoming spam - and it hardly ever identifies legitimate email
as spam. That said, there are usually several new spams to teach it
about each week. I'm using SpamSieve with Mail and GyazMail, a very nice
$18 shareware alternative to Apple's Mail app that has replaced Emailer
and PowerMail for me.
GyazMail is faster than Apple's Mail, and the interface is a bit
more like Claris Emailer. Best of all, GyazMail is written to interface
with SpamSieve. And it's really nice to be using only two email
programs - both of them OS X native.
I still take a quick look through my mailboxes for missed spam and
misidentified legitimate email, usually find a couple a day, and keep
training SpamSieve.
Fighting Back
If I don't check my email over the weekend - and that used to be
pretty common - one of my mailboxes could have 1,500 messages in it
come Monday, and well over 1,200 of them would be spam. Between all of
my accounts, I probably got 400 spams a day, and I was tired of it.
I'm not alone. Macs Only! looked
for a solution, found Sp@mX, and has been sharing weekly reports.
They were receiving over 4,000 spams a week before installing Sp@mX,
and after four weeks of use they reduced incoming spam by over
two-thirds.
Sp@mX is a different way of dealing with spam. While some ISPs
filter out some (perhaps in some cases most) of it and most email
programs can filter and label much of it, they do nothing to reduce the
amount of spam on the Internet. Sp@mX does.
Sp@mX is a tool for reporting spam to the ISPs that allow it on the
Internet in the first place. It will "parse the messages, and using the
SMTP header information from each message, it will accurately trace the
Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the spammer.
"It will then automatically compose and send an email abuse
complaint to the ISP reporting the spammer's improper use of their
service that contains a message defined by you, plus all of the
technical information that the ISP needs to take action against the
spammer!"
Here's a spam report sent out by Sp@mX (my listmom address is
published and already gets lots of spam, so posting it here won't cause
any further damage):
- I believe this email either originated from your domain, your
domain was involved in it's delivery, or you are the victim of a
spammer abusing your domain. All of the information is included for you
to take action.
-
- Here is the SMTP information.
- IP Address(es) traced through 221.231.56.211 -
- Spamvertized Domain(s) ONLINEGENERICSHOP.COM -
- Domain(s) traced through JSINFO.NET - NS.CHINANET.CN.NET -
- Abuse address(es) traced to POSTMASTER@ONLINEGENERICSHOP.COM -
ABUSE@JSINFO.NET - ABUSE@PUB.NT.JSINFO.NET -
CTSUMMARY@SPECIAL.ABUSE.NET - POSTMASTER@CHINANET.CN.NET -
ANTI-SPAM@CHINANET.CN.NET -
- *** Email Contents *****
- From marissa_jpeck83@jalasjarvi.fi Sat Jan 15 03:08:20 +0400
2005
- X-Original-To: listmom@lemlists.com
- Delivered-To: listmom@lemlists.com
- Return-Path: marissa_jpeck83@jalasjarvi.fi
- Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])
- by archipelago.cwis.biz (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9186ADB714;
- Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:06:08 -0600 (CST)
- Received: from archipelago.cwis.biz ([127.0.0.1])
- by localhost (archipelago.cwis.biz [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port
10024)
- with ESMTP id 83020-10; Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:06:07 -0600 (CST)
- Received: from traknet.co.uk (unknown [221.231.56.211])
- by archipelago.cwis.biz (Postfix) with SMTP id D5A4BDB701
- for <listmom@lemlists.com>; Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:06:00 -0600
(CST)
- Received: from 31.136.61.230 by smtp.jalasjarvi.fi;
- Fri, 14 Jan 2005 23:08:42 +0000
- Message-ID:
<73b101c4fa8d$208d0b34$0b5d9cc4@traknet.co.uk>
- From: "Marissa J. Peck" <marissa_jpeck83@jalasjarvi.fi>
- To: listmom@lemlists.com
- Subject: Tadalafil Soft Tabs - Great results!
- Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 03:08:20 +0400
- MIME-Version: 1.0
- X-Priority: 3
- X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
- X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158
- X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
- Content-Type: text/plain;
- charset="iso-8859-1"
- Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
- X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at cwis.biz
- X-UIDL: d0db15ad91deff44e0b9e00aa2596d50
- Status: O
-
- [body of email]
-
- *** End ***********319
|
If you decide to use Sp@mX, be prepared to deal with a lot of
additional email - bounce reports due to nonexistent or full mailboxes
and abuse reports from the email providers you're reporting the spam
to.
Out of the reports Sp@mX generated, I probably received automated
replies from email providers half the time - and some of them do report
closing down the account of the spammers.
I didn't keep close tabs on stats during the first week I was using
Sp@mX while I was discovering the ins and outs of the program, but
statistics from weeks two through five show that it helps.
How You Work with Sp@mX
To use Sp@mX, you first have to identify your spam. If you only
receive a little, you can do that manually - but then you're probably
not a candidate for Sp@mX. If you receive a lot, a tool like SpamSieve
or Apple's junk mail filter does a pretty good job identifying spam.
Just be sure to peruse the marked spam and delete any false positives
(legitimate email identified as spam) before exporting your junk email
to Sp@mX.
In Mail, put all your spam into one folder, select it all, and
choose Save As... under the File menu. Save all of your messages as Raw
Message Source in whatever folder you've configured Sp@mX to look
into.
In GyazMail, put all your spam into one folder, select it all, and
choose Export > Unix mbox under the file menu. Again, save this file
to the folder Sp@mX uses.
Be sure you set your preferences to "Apple Mail (Mac)" before
running Sp@mX with Mail or GyazMail files, which will extract all of
the individual messages from your big file.
With one of my webmail accounts, my strategy is to open up each
message in Firefox, view the source, and save the text file into the
spam folder. Then delete it and move on to the next one - sometimes
well over 100 in a day.
For email saved this way, be sure to set your preferences to
"Process Email as Plain Text" before running Sp@mX.
When you run Sp@mX, it analyzes the entire email, paying particular
attention to the header so it can identify both the point of origin and
any mail server the message went through before reaching me. It then
generates and sends out a message like the one above to each link in
the email chain.
I haven't reduced my level of spam to virtually nothing because a
lot of people along the email chain aren't doing their part to suspend
spamming accounts or prevent relaying of spam email messages. Still,
I've reduced my level of spam by over 30% in five weeks, which is a big
step in the right direction.
Getting Better All the Time
Jeff Hendrickson keeps improving Sp@mX, and for a while there were
improved versions available every few days. This first version I
downloaded choked on some emails, but the next version fixed that
problem. A later version added an online "white list" of domains that
spam reports should not be sent to, and Sp@mX checks that list every
time it's launched. The newest version (3.3.0) included reporting
findings to a server as Hendrickson Software.
Users have made suggestions to improve the program, and many of them
have already been implemented. The author is always looking for ways to
make Sp@mX better.
If you're tired of spam and want to fight back, give Sp@mX a try. If
it doesn't reduce your spam within a month, Hendrickson Software will
refund your money.
I consider it $20 well spent and plan to continue using it to
further reduce the amount of spam I receive.
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