[Gllug] Spam

[Jackson, Harry]

Hi all

Quite a while ago I got myself an email account with yahoo and deliberately
named it a little bit obscure to avoid the obvious Spam. I am now using this
mail address more and more on public lists so I am getting Spam on a regular
basis. I am pissed off at this intrusion and have been knocking some ideas
around in my head as to how I could have it stopped for me as a user. I know
stopping open relays and the rest of the stuff is probably a pipe dream so
would it be possible to do something like the following or would it be
pointless. Could the following be applied to fetchmail or any pop access
method.


I only accept mail from people in my address book.
I will only accept mail from people who have a keyword in the subject line.
Any missing or non qualified headers and the mail gets dropped.

I know that there would be some severe performance problems for high use but
for ordinary home use this should not be a problem. It would not stop
anybody targeting your address and fudging the from line but I believe that
you can check the sources on decent mail systems as well and drop on that. I
know fsck all about the ins and outs of mail as can probably be spotted from
above but I am sick to death of sending Hotmail Yahoo and various other
providers complaints about Spam which appears to originate from their
direction. No one seems to give a flying fsck about this kind of abuse, or
at least enough that some major steps will be taken to reduce the crap. As
far as I am concerned Spam can be classified as theft, fraud, deception,
stalking, abuse and various other forms of criminal activity.  The law at
the moment seems to be a bit fuzzy due to spams international scope and no
one seems to hand out the type of punishment that these edjits deserve.

What is everyone else using to avoid Spam and how affective is the top mail
servers at filtering it. I know there are some very fancy stuff out there to
avoid Spam but are there any quick and dirty solutions to the avoid shit bar
staying off line.

Ideally what would be ideal is a lovely GUI controlling a secure fetchmail
with several options asking for keywords, accept addresses, domains and
filters on profanity which would probably get rid of a lot of the Gllug mail
when I come to think about it.


Regards;
Harry Jackson.


     


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