There is one important rule for completely avoiding spam – don’t use email! No, I’m quite serious. You can take all the precautions you want, but if you send even one email to someone from your primary email address, then you cannot guarantee that that email will not be forwarded to someone else, and someone else, ad infinitum. This has happened to me. Send a joke/article/column to a friend and eventually, 1000’s of people could get your email address as one person after another forwards it. I’ve tried putting warnings on my email not to forward it and I’ve tried to instruct people on how and why they should copy the content and paste it into another email if they want to forward it, all to no avail. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only safe way to send mail is to ALWAYS do it from a decoy address. But then you may run into the problem of people thinking what you are sending them is spam because they don’t know the source email address, which may change from time to time. I am looking into getting a decoy email service and considering dumping my present domain name and email all together, essentially starting over again…
Also, if you have your own domain name (like I do), then there really isn’t any way to stop spam at all. Verisign, et al, will sell access to the internet domain dB to essentially anyone in their quest for profits. These people, the bulk mailers, then download every extant domain name where they know that at least something like postmaster@domainname will work. I’d like to see a way to make domain private. But then you might not be able to track down the cretins, sigh.
However, give the above, you can eliminate most, if not all spam. Here’s how I’ve done it:
I’ve looked at a variety of pop3 email filtering tools but none have solved the problem of blocking 95%+ of spam until I stumbled on a little-known free program called SpamWeasel (http://www.mailgate.com). I’ve had this program on my system for about 6 months but recently have spent a lot more time getting to know to SW intimately. This program is absolutely terrific. It is head and shoulders above Outlook filters. Once set up correctly, SW does the job automatically, without me having to preview mail on the server and make choices or go through a junk file in Outlook and delete it from there.
On average I get 25-30 spam mails daily. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been getting 99-100% successful catches on spam! As a new variant comes in, I verify and teach SW what to throw away. None of this spam ever gets into Outlook, which eliminates a lot of potential security issues. I review the SW deleted email archive (a text file) to ensure that a valid email wasn’t inadvertently deleted. When I find something that should have been allowed to pass through the filter, I add its address to a pass-through filer in SW for future receives and re-queue it to be sent to my Outlook inbox. One trick I’ve noticed recently that the spammers have adopted is to make the subject line essentially meaningless and the spam body has no real HTML or text content. The content is instead an image file. This can’t be parsed by SW. But by viewing source, I can block the domain it is coming from. The ad-blocking software I use (http://www.filtergate.com) also has good success blocking the IMG links in Outlook 2000.
At first, the help file is difficult to grasp w/o some serious thought and the interface could be better designed. Sadly, SW is not for the novice. But it is all understandable after working with it for a couple of weeks. SW includes a scripting language and I have modified and added a few rules to further enhance processing for my needs. There are helpful docs at http://www.mailgate.com/download/docs.asp, though they are a bit out of date. But again, still very useful.
I have been told by the support staff that there will be a Spam Weasel Pro version coming out in the near future. I have heard the cost will be about $20 but don’t know what it will add to the free version. However, I will pay it
It’s almost boring these days to look at my Outlook mailbox and only have to deal with my regular mail [g]. SW saves me a great deal of time. Take a look.
P.S. I’ve attached a segment of the SW archive viewer which shows the spam email that was caught today (and not sent to Outlook). This is not the whole display because I want to protect my real email address.
P.P.S. I do not have any business relationship with Mailgate. This is just a real example of something that works and that you might want to try.
or you miss e-mails that you should receive 
, so you have to go and check the filer rejected list to make sure you haven’t missed something important, and you have to keep adding the address of the Spammers to a blacklist of some sort. Then, of course, they only catch and reject (filter) what you have listed in in your blacklist. Works fine if the spammers keep using the same source addresses and “to be filtered” text. These types of filters also rely on downloading everything first for filtering, which can take a considerable amount of time, especially on a slow old dialup service. Using this type of filter software I was still getting about 50% of the spam messages onto my laptop Inbox.
.
