I’d like to publicly thank Orange for getting confused as to whether they have or haven’t removed me from their mailing list.

I think if I receive anymore, I’ll just set a filter to permanently block Orange from reaching me. It’s much easier!

I laugh at emails like this.

Ticket Number: 5647600545188
Ref: UK/9420X2/68, Batch: 074/05/ZY369
Attention: Lucky Winner,
We are happy to announce that you are one of our Lucky Four(4)
Star Prize Winner in this months edition of the UK National Lottery
held on 29th of September 2007 in England.
This makes you a proud Winner of 850,000 Great British Pounds.
To claim your prize Contact the claim office with the underlisted
informations as soon as possible:
Name,Address,Country,Age,Sex,Occupation,Phone, Fax.
Best Regards,
Carlton Adams

Nice one Carlton Adams, but I don’t believe your 850,000 Great British pounds are real.
Your “claim office”, a hotmail email address, is hardly convincing either.

I’ve been adding a few honey pots to various different websites I run. I’ve also added several MX entries in order for random addresses to be created. This is my contribution to combating spam.

I run MailScanner and SpamAssassin here at SDJL, which does a great job of catching spam and nasty email content.
Recently there’s been quite of spammy email getting through those filters. I made a couple of changes to the default rules in place and I seem to be catching most of the spam now.

Here’s my custom SpamAssassin rule set for those that want to make use of it.

score BAYES_99 5.0
score URIBL_SBL 5.0
score URIBL_AB_SURBL 5.0
score URIBL_OB_SURBL 5.0
score URIBL_PH_SURBL 5.0
score URIBL_SC_SURBL 5.0
score URIBL_WS_SURBL 5.0
score URIBL_JP_SURBL 5.0
score BAYES_00 -2.0
score RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL 2.5
score FORGED_RCVD_HELO 0.6
score RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL 3.7
score RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB 2.0

Original spam rules were from ConfigServer, but I’ve added a few of my own to make it even more aggressive.

To use these rules, create a file called /etc/mail/spamassassin/sdjl.cf and add the above code to it.
If you utilise MailScanner, reload it using the following command.

service MailScanner reload

Spam is an ever increasing problem and unfortunately, something which isn’t going to stop for a very long time.
There are certain measures that you can take to help eradicate the spam that reaches your inbox and here are just a few that I can recommend.

Be proactive
If you do get spam e-mails, don’t click unsubscribe links or enter your email address into any web-pages that say they’ll remove your address. These are normally places that confirm your email address exists and you’re likely to get more spam by following the links.

3rd party
You can employ a third party to filter your e-mails for you. If you have your own web-hosting and use a domain name to send and receive your e-mails, you can see what options your web-host has to help protect your e-mails.
I employ a system called MailScanner here, which does a good job of finding and tagging e-mails coming into the server. As an example, 75% of e-mails coming into my server are spam and are tagged that way.

Many hosting providers and ISP’s give you basic spam filtering options which are relatively easy to setup and use.

Software
You can install additional software on your PC or Mac, which can aid in the detection of spam.
Theses pieces of software are primarily for use if you use Outlook or similar program to download your e-mails.

POPFile
POPFile is an easy to install, small piece of software for windows based computers. Once installed you change a couple of settings inside Outlook to filter e-mails through POPFile. If any spam e-mails do get through, you have an easy to use interface which enables you to tag an e-mail as spam. This trains the software into learning which e-mails are spam and good.

Cost: £free
URL: http://popfile.sourceforge.net

SpamSieve
SpamSieve is very similar to POPFile, but orientated to the Mac OS X operating system. A little bit easier to use and configure compared to POPFile, it does exactly the same. Change one setting in OS X Mail and you’re away. Tagging e-mails as good and spam is far easier as you can do it via the OS X Mail interface, instead of through a seperate interface.

Cost: $30
URL: http://c-command.com/spamsieve

[tags]internet, software, spam, email[/tags]