SPAM Explosion in mail.app

[neuby]

I give up. This program used to work very well at filtering mail, but now every little bit of spam appears to get through. I continually mark about a thousand a week as 'spam', but they all still get through.

I know we all have different situations regarding our relative 'status' on the spammers lists. I used to 'bounce' back all spam to the spammers, thinking that would remove me from their list eventually, but it seems to have backfired.

Damn, email was such a good idea. Guess anything free becomes worth what you pay for it.

Suggestions?

[Satcomer]

I was wondering if you use the .Mac mail service? I ask this because if you check the .Mac discussion threads (on Apple's .Mac boards) and you are most definitely not alone. Ever since .Mac's "server maintenance" it seems their server spam catcher (I think it is called Brightmail or something) has stopped working. This has happened before (last year). This with the recent .Mac mail server outages has made me look to alternatives.

[ora]

Originally Posted by Satcomer

This has happened before (last year). This with the recent .Mac mail server outages has made me look to alternatives.

No spam on my macosx.com account

[btoth]

Spam has a lot to do with who you give your email address to (unless of course you use AOL or any of those "services". And replying to spam (which is usually hopeless since the addresses are fake) only confirms your existence and you usually get more. If the emails have links to unsubscribe to them, that actually works a lot of the time for the more legitimate spam emails.

[perfessor101]

I use Mail and .Mac but 98% of the spam I receive is through my Verizon email account. Yes the filter in Mail does seem to quit working for a while, but that is almost always because the spammers have figured out a new way to trick the spam filters. One this week used an unbroken string of nonsense words with no spaces, but the actual message text was all in bold and the other text in light gray. Spam filters could not identify words or phrases to trigger on because the whole message was one long word, but the intended text was certainly readable. I have also seen spam text that was surrounded by < > so that it appeared as if it were HTML tags. Spam filters ignored the text because it appeared as if it was HTML and since the rendering engine did not recognize the tag, it just passed the text right along. All of these tricks work, for a while, until the filters at the ISP and the filter in Mail learn the new trick. It is a never ending battle.

Bill Gates has proposed a postage charge for sending all email (with Microsoft getting a rake off for administering the system of course.) It would probably take the spammers less than fifteen minutes to figure out how to charge their postage to an unsuspecting internet user. Imagine getting a bill from the post office via Microsoft for sending tens of thousands of emails that you know nothing about!

The only sure way of getting rid of most spam is to use a "white list" approach that considers anything that is not from an address in your address book as spam. That is an easy rule to setup in Mail by the way. The difficulty of this is a high percentage of "desirable" mail winds up identified as spam and you have to constantly monitor the junk mailbox to be sure good mail is not getting through, which sort of defeats the purpose. I know because I tried it for a few days. My address book grew dramatically too.

[neuby]

The 'Reset' in the Spam filter appears to have done something. It actually caught some spam on the last mail check.

Will see how it fares over a day or so.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Originally Posted by perfessor101

Bill Gates has proposed a postage charge for sending all email (with Microsoft getting a rake off for administering the system of course.) It would probably take the spammers less than fifteen minutes to figure out how to charge their postage to an unsuspecting internet user. Imagine getting a bill from the post office via Microsoft for sending tens of thousands of emails that you know nothing about!

I heard about the proposed charge, but not from Bill Gates! Link?!

[Satcomer]

Originally Posted by btoth

Spam has a lot to do with who you give your email address to (unless of course you use AOL or any of those "services". And replying to spam (which is usually hopeless since the addresses are fake) only confirms your existence and you usually get more. If the emails have links to unsubscribe to them, that actually works a lot of the time for the more legitimate spam emails.

Negative. How do I know? Well, I disabled forwarding, and the .Mac webmail filled right up while my ISP did not. Also, this started about a week ago, .Mac boards are filled with posts with the same EXACT symptoms, many of the spam message headers have a blanket hit every .Mac email address and I am VERY careful with my email address after the 1998 Hotmail spam deluge. I maybe old, but I do learn my lessons. All I am saying is I have a personal email address (.Mac) and a web based email for store purchases.

At this point it looks like a spammer is targeting .Mac address and Apple is ignoring the problem. A .Mac poster (I for his/her name) brings up a interesting question, It seems the .Mac services have been forgotten by Apple because in two years the services have not improved one bit and have only become worse from when it was a free service. They have been stagnate while the only trinkets have been thrown at the users (even those have stopped).