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Monte Milanuk
12-23-2006, 1:11 AM
Hello,

I've been getting slammed the last few months w/ spam of one sort or another. Stuff that *consistently* makes it thru M$ Outlook's Junk Mail filters, and the filters of ZoneAlarm 6.5 suite (think it uses MailFrontier as a backend)... 10-20 messages a day or more that make it thru the filters, out of probably 50-100 total.

The messages are annoyingly the same, almost every dang time. Not sure how to set up a rule in Outlook to really effectively trap these things since the address and domains changes so much.

Recently swapped over to Norton Internet Security '07 which has anti-virus but no anti-spam.

Anybody have a *good* anti-spam software package that they recommend? I've avoided having to use white-lists and challenge-response systems this long, but I'm afraid it may be the only way around this now.

TIA,


Monte

Loy Hawes
12-23-2006, 5:55 AM
You could try Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/)

Wil Lambert
12-23-2006, 7:58 AM
We gave up on the fight. I now use Gmail for all of my email and have had very good luck. The now have a beta service for using Gmail and other Google apps on your website. You havew to change the MX records for your site and all mail then goes through Gmail. You email address still is yourname@mysite.com. Have to say hands down best switch I have made.

Wil

Monte Milanuk
12-23-2006, 8:16 AM
Loy,

Thunderbird is a wonderful stand-alone mail client no doubt; used it for years. It lacks (or lacked, haven't checked recently) in one area that Outlook excels in... calendar and scheduling. I use it (Outlook) at work and at home as I work rotating shifts (i.e. nights, weekends, 5 week cycles, etc.) and you'd be surprised how hard it is to schedule that kind of rotation into most simple web calendars such as Yahoo or even Google's online calendars. There are dedicated web caledar apps/sites that rival Outlook in it's calendar capability, but then I loose the integration between Outlook and the other Office apps and my Address book. May have to give up something, I guess and make the best of a situation.

Wil,

Something about that seems just... wrong, as it's a Yahoo! Small Business hosted site :cool: Technically feasible, though, and worth considering.

Thanks,

Monte

Wil Lambert
12-23-2006, 9:47 AM
[qoute]
Wil,

Something about that seems just... wrong, as it's a Yahoo! Small Business hosted site :cool: Technically feasible, though, and worth considering.

Thanks,

Monte[/quote]

The yourname at mysite.com was just for reference. I didn't know that it was a link to an actual site. Better Example : My site is lgilaserart.com . My email with gmails new service is still ( wil at lgilaserart.com ). Hope this clears if up.

Here is the link to the new service. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/overview.html

Hope this is not a TOS violation. If it is sorry.

Wil

Forrest Price
12-23-2006, 10:18 AM
I have good luck with Thunderbird, and I downloaded the "calendar" add-on for it. a perfect match as far as I'm concerned.

Monte Milanuk
12-23-2006, 11:22 AM
Forrest,

Good point; I'd forgotten about all the little 'extensions' available for Thunderbird.

How does the calendaring app compare w/ the calendar in Outlook, if you've used it at all? I probably don't come near using that thing to capacity, but for some reason finding apps that allow me to schedule repeating events on a *five* (or any arbitrary) week interval has been surprising... in the number of products that allow intervals of seven days, four weeks, 12 months, or annual, and not something else (say every 34 days or every 17 months, whatever). That's probably the biggest sticking point for me.

I'll d'l T-bird and take a look.

Thanks,

Monte

Monte Milanuk
12-24-2006, 3:13 PM
Think I might have this thing whipped (knock on wood). Turns out as I dug around a bit more in the website settings (I have a small web site hosted thru Yahoo! and all the admin & webmaster mail comes to my inbox) that there was a box checked saying in effect 'send me any otherwise unassigned mail sent to this domain'. Un-checked that and got a new mail client w/ improved spam recognition/filtering (T-Bird), and suddenly the spam traffic dropped to almost nothing. Hallelujah!!!

Jim Becker
12-24-2006, 3:39 PM
Ah...the "universal alias" problem. My hosting service actually recommends that it be turned off...in big, bold letters for exactly this reason. A universal alias will route any dreck that someone tries to send to your domain no matter what they guess.