Catch this spam

[lovingboth]

If you've got a .uk domain, you've probably been getting some odd spam (not selling anything, just taunting you about how much spam you're getting) sent to catchthismail@ the domain.

[Poll #931238]

In other spam news, I've just had one offering me a list of 1,58,000 Indian companies (thus showing it probably does come from India - one hundred thousand is a 'lakh', so Indians put a comma there, rather than at the million mark) which boasts that it's 85% accurate.

Gosh.

Comments

[tempaccount99]

I wouldn't have noticed unless you'd pointed it out, but they've been trying to send about two an hour for most of the last few days.. Is there a back-story, or just something you noticed yourself?

[lovingboth]

I noticed it yesterday morning.

Yep - that's the level I've been getting: random firstname lastname, subject is the firstname, two lines of the text vary.

Someone's clearly gone through a list of .co.uk domains, but why? It's not trying to sell anything, but there's not enough of it to be a proper denial of service, and sending it to the same almost-certainly-not-normally-used address makes it trivial to block.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

I was getting them on my dot com domain. They seem to be being filtered out now. One of these days I will host my own domain name and do this kind of admin myself, but not yet.

[vampwillow]

I have multiple .com/.org/.net/.co.uk/.org.uk and haven't seen this particular 'edition' at all.

But then I do run a lot of spam filters, so I presume they've been doing their job ;-P

[aster13.livejournal.com]

I don't seem to be getting these, but i could really do with some tips on how to set up a server to filter out some spam :(

My friend paulthegeek kindly hosts my site on his at home, but i do get fairly large amounts of spam and would like LESS!

[lovingboth]

I've used three methods with success:

1) Use a spam proxy - a program which collects your email, filters it and then acts as a mail server for your email program.

POPFile was the one I used and it has the particular feature of being able to recognise - after a day or two of you showing it - all sorts of emails, as many as you can distinguish yourself. So mailing list posts, wanted commercial mail, personal mail etc were being tagged as well as 'probable spam' and 'certain spam'.

Another Bayesian filter is CRM114 (or something like that - it's named after a device in Dr Strangelove!) Other people like Spam Assassin which uses another approach, but I could never get on with it and it's targeted by the spammers (they will see if it gets past it).

2) Let the email program do it. Thunderbird has its own Bayesian filtering. When I started using it, I stopped bothering with POPFile.

3) Collect your email via Google's gmail or set it up on the server to be sent there. Let Google's spam filters do their work. This is what I do for one account that's not hosted by me.

Gmail also makes a very good backup archive - if you can set up the mailserver so it delivers one copy of your incoming mail to your usual POP3 mailbox and one to gmail, you're laughing.