< --Rant--> I’m absolutely buried with several deadline projects, family stuff, and prepping for travel to Florida for the Annual Nanpa Conference. The computer problems I had last month caused me to play catch-up for several weeks. Now, my valuable and limited time is being wasted waging war with the delete button. For whatever reason, the amount of SPAM messages that I’ve been getting has increase three or four fold. Yesterday, in twelve hours, I received 200 SPAM emails and 7 legitimate emails. Ugh! Is it like this with everyone? Now I must admit I’m partly to blame, in that I keep my email server spam filters from deleting messages, if fear of loosing real business emails. But this has to stop…
The compromise? I’ve now set me email server to issue an automated challenge to incoming emails. If you send me a message, you’ll now be asked to reply to a single automated email. You’re email address will then be added to my approved list, and your original message will then be delivered to me.
The one thing I hate more than anything with this arrangement is that a business has to actually issue a challenge to a legitimate customer as part of its very first communication. This is definitely not the way it should be. Thanks &@$R $&&* alot, Spammers. < --/Rant-->
Instead of automatically issuing a challenge question, I think you need to develop a better spam filter or subscribe to a service that filters your e-mail for a fee.
I think sending a challenge question to spammers will only make the spamming worse by confirming to the spammers that your e-mail address is valid and active.
I’ve set my spam filter (provided by my ISP) on my public e-mail account in such a way that I only get about 6 to 10 spams a week. Before I customized my ISP’s e-mail spam filter I was receiving about 80-100 spam e-mails a day. So spam filters do work if set up intelligently.
I agree with Peter. Personally I woudln’t do the “challenge” because it gives off a negative vibe to everyone else who is legit. I enable a spam notifier on my cPanel which labels suspected spam as spam and moves those to the spam folder in Outlook.
Gary,
I bet you’ll lose far more legitimate emails, and alienate potential customers, by issuing that challenge email than you ever would by using a spam filter.
I hate spam, too, and get tons of it every day. Best solution I’ve found is to have my domain-name email forwarded to my Google gmail address. Google does a very good job of filtering the spam and puts it in a separate folder so you can periodically make a quick check to ensure you’re not missing an important message.
Thanks fo rthe comments guys. Peter, can I ask how you’ve got it set up. Mine gives options to tag, which seems impotent and doesn’t tag many at all, or delete, which is guaranteed to delete some legitimates.
I hate the challenge and would love an alternative.
Greg, I’ve had someone else mention the gmail option. My question would you then be forced to have all of your mail archived on google servers, or can you somehow also get it into an outlook or eudora folder on your own HD?
Cheers & Thanks again
Gary,
I have used Outlook Express to retrieve Google Mail, and am now using Entourage, a (sort of) Mac equivalent of Outlook. I’m almost certain Eudora would work, too. You can set up the programs to leave messages on Google, or delete them after they’re read. I’m beginning to leave some important mail on Google, as a backup in case of computer or hard drive failure.
Google is generous with storage space, and allows fairly large files to go through as attachments. Gmail has very good, and easy, instructions for getting it to work with the various email clients.
Gary,
My ISP (AT&T) allows me to block e-mail by domain or individual e-mail addresses. I have found this to be the most effective way to cut down on spam (besides the obvious filtering of key spam words like ‘Viagra’ ‘RX’ or ‘meds’.
Basically, what I did was examine all spam I received in a one week period (which was 500+ messages) and then blocked all e-mail from domains I knew I had an extremely little chance of getting a legitimate e-mail from. This accounted for about 80% of the spam messages.
Then for the rest of the spam messages, I blocked the individual e-mail address that sent the spam.
And after blocking either the domain or the e-mail address of the spam message, I reported the spam message to my ISP (AT&T).
After doing this for the first time, the amount of spam I received drop greatly (to about 50 a week). After a month of doing this domain and e-mail blocking, the amount of spam I have received dropped to 6 to 10 spams a week.
And actually for the past three-week period, I’ve received only 4 spam messages TOTAL (knock on wood!).
If you are concerned that this might be a too drastic of an approach, you shouldn’t be. As long as you list/publicize alternate ways that your clients (or potential clients) can use to contact you (like your business telephone/FAX number and/or your business postal address) you shouldn’t fear that a legitimate customer or prospect of yours would not be able to contact you if, by a very small chance, he or she was trying to send you an e-mail message from a domain you had previously blocked because of the spam messages that had been sent from the now blocked domain.
hey Gary,
I’m with you man, what a hassle it is. I’ve been getting in the vicinity of 200 — 250 spam a day, and whilst I’m living in the shack, I have to use webmail, rather than my Mac mail program, which makes checking email a nightmare. I’m in the process of moving my site to another server, and hopefully they can do something about it – the hosting company I’ve been with so far are less competent with computer stuff, so it seems, than even I am.
Good luck with it.
Cheers
Carl