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View Full Version : Any spam filters that work?



dennis thompson
11-12-2015, 8:42 AM
I am overwhelmed with spam. I use Verizon email and their spam filter seems to be useless. Anybody use a spam filter that works?
Thanks

glenn bradley
11-12-2015, 8:51 AM
I only accept email from people I am expecting it from. It is a little more work at first but, after a month or two I am safe sending all email I do not specifically allow to the SPAM folder for automatic deletion. You start by setting a filter that says "if you are not in my contacts list, you are SPAM" but, don't set it to automatically delete yet.

Then once a day or so for a few weeks you look through the SPAM folder marking things you want as "not SPAM" and leaving the others be. Once you get to the point that you do not see anything you want ending up in the SPAM folder, set it to automatically delete after a few days.

I let people know that if they plan to email me, be sure to let me know so that I can add them to the "white list". To some this may seem extreme but, I have no need of unsolicited mail in paper form or electronic so, it works for me.

Myk Rian
11-12-2015, 9:40 AM
Mozilla Thunderbird with Adaware.

Dan Hintz
11-12-2015, 10:25 AM
Try SpamBayes...

Lee Schierer
11-12-2015, 11:21 AM
Mozilla Thunderbird has a feature that allows you to tag spam and send it to the trash. It remembers those selections and will automatically trash future copies.

Dan Hintz
11-12-2015, 11:42 AM
Mozilla Thunderbird has a feature that allows you to tag spam and send it to the trash. It remembers those selections and will automatically trash future copies.

I use it, but it's pretty useless. Its blocking criteria are pretty lame, so you just get the same spam over and over, coming from different IPs, etc. there's no intelligence to it. I've just been blocking the IP addresses of the servers spamming me... well over 50% are based in the US, so that says something (and not good).

SpamBayes, once trained, does a pretty good job at blocking spam it has never seen before but seems to fit the "profile" of spam.

Steve Peterson
11-12-2015, 11:48 AM
Mozilla Thunderbird has a feature that allows you to tag spam and send it to the trash. It remembers those selections and will automatically trash future copies.

I share a name with a marketing executive at my company. It is unbelievable how many emails I get from people trying to sell me a contact list or get me to close more sales. At last count I had over 2500 names added to my junk email filter and add another 2-3 every day. The worst ones are from the same person, but from a different server. I have to create a rule to filter those with a generic tag.

Steve

Brian Henderson
11-12-2015, 12:49 PM
Mozilla Thunderbird with Adaware.

That's what I use, works great.

Charles Wiggins
11-12-2015, 12:49 PM
The filter on Gmail seems to be pretty good, and it seems to have gotten a lot better recently. I used to have a lot of "real" email that ended up in the SPAM folder, but not so much recently, although the amount of spam showing up has increased dramatically recently as well. But very few make it through to my Inbox.

Garth Almgren
11-12-2015, 1:53 PM
Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/) is a really good prefilter. I had the Pro version before my domain got switched to Gmail (which is also very good at filtering out the unwanted stuff) but the free version works just as well for one email address.

roger wiegand
11-12-2015, 1:59 PM
+1 for Gmail filtering, yahoo is also very good. My wife had horrible spam but didn't want to change her email address so I set up Gmail account and auto-forwarded all of her mail through it. It eliminated about 99% of her spam.

I use one address for "real" email and a throwaway address for any form that I have to fill out on the interweb. Even after a decade of use the first address gets only a handful of spam, while the one used publicly is about 90% spam. The Yahoo filtering makes it possible to read even with that high level of contamination.

paul cottingham
11-12-2015, 3:10 PM
Push your mail through gmail. The filtering is excellent.

Brian Elfert
11-12-2015, 4:04 PM
Another vote for Gmail, but even the filtering they do can be strange. They put promotions email in a folder by itself, but sometimes email I asked for goes in there. In other cases promotions emails go to spam instead.

My employer's spam filter discards about 97% of all email, but employees still complain about spam.

Roger Feeley
11-12-2015, 5:41 PM
I heard a talk by Bill Gates once where he proposed a solution that I think would work. To be fair, I don't know for sure if it was his idea or he was quoting someone else.

All emails cost money to handle but not much. Say...1/100th of a cent. The money is charged to the sender. The money goes to pay the ISPs for managing the system. You can 'whitelist' a sender which means they can send you email for free. Your internet service would come with $.05 worth of emails which should be just fine for all of us. A legitimate business can easily afford the fee and some customers would whitelist them making it even cheaper.

The spammers depend on getting one hit from millions of emails sent. Even this minuscule charge would put them out of business.

Paul Saffold
11-12-2015, 7:46 PM
I have several gmail accounts and had no spam for several years. Then about 6 months ago one of the accounts started getting spammed. Several hundred a day some days. I now check that account manually rather than having the mail collected by apple mail. The other gmail accounts have been fine.

Mark Blatter
11-12-2015, 11:37 PM
Yet another vote for gmail, even if Google no longer says "don't be evil'. I have been using it since it was invitation only and cannot think of the last spam I received that they didn't block.