Paris Hilton, Ciali$, fake fbi/cia mails...yeah, it's hitting us hard too, on all accounts. We tried new accounts for some things, and still those get whacked within a few days. Whatever happened to the spam laws and punishments? Seems like the first 20 minutes of the morning are spend deleting spam, and that's with a reasonably good spam filter system set to "light" so we don't lose forum notices from other communities.

Interestingly, in looking at the Full Headers option, it's going to a brand new account I was just offered by Yahoo - firstname.lastname -AT- Yahoo dot com. I signed up, and I guess it was at that point that they started flooding in. I just got that account, have never given the address out to a single person.

There's your problem. There have been "spambots" out there trying first.last@ and last.first@ popular domains for years. I've seen kelly.chien@ my domains attempts sometimes hundreds of times per day for at least 6 or 7 years now as well as julie.clark@ sam.smith@ paula.baker@ .... etc.. Since these types of addresses are very common, the spambots will use a dictionary of first and last names and try every combination in the hopes that a few will get through. So, your new address has probably had spam attempts for a long long time; you just didn't know about it until you activated the address.

I find gmail filtering very good - anyone need an account drop me a msg:
gerrie then a "w" with no dot or anything then the at sign then gmail.com


//Garo

I have a yahoo account and before the new spam laws went in to effect, I got ~5 a day. then it jumped to 200. :)

Yaho has pretty good spam filtering though. It keep 99.9% of all my spam in my spam box. About 2-5 get through out of several hundreda day.

The bad part is that most of the spam I recieve in my in-box I click on to read it. Why? Because I deal with people I don't know sometimes and the subjects look like something I should read. I have (had? not sure. that e-mail is bonky right now) that all I would get is russian spam about selling be discount softwre. :) Go figure!

One thing i really like about the email software i use (Netscape, if you're curious, and also stuff i've written myself) is that one of the columns displayed in my inbox is the "To:" address. That helps enormously when scanning through the day's pile and deciding what to look at. If the "To:" address isn't my address, it's just about guaranteed to be either garbage, or a group forward (which is still probably garbage). It makes weeding through the list a lot faster and easier.

Thanks for posting this. I thought I had done something wrong.

Not only has the number of emails increase dramatically, but every one of them has a virus attached. In addition, Yahoo's excellent spam filter is so overwhelmed that it is letting a lot of these to get into my real email inbox.

All of the big ISPs (Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, AOL etc.) are working on technologies to fight spam. Filtering is a band-aid and not really the solution - the root problem is to do with the way email is sent around the Internet (the protocols used make it easy to "spoof" the apparent sender address).

This has all been going on for over a year - SPF is one technology being pushed by AOL and others, Microsoft pushes their own variant called SenderID and Yahoo has one called DomainKeys which is technically better than the others but more complicated to implement.

The point is that these techniques make it possible for the receiver of an email to verify that it really does come from who it says it does. With that guarantee in place you can then mark any email that doesn't check out as "suspect" with a far higher confidence level than filtering can give. It also becomes possible to build up "reputation databases" of known spamming domains, which can then be used to help identify spam.

The last I heard all this new stuff was under test. Hopefully the ISPs will implement them in full sometime soon - and then we should see a big reduction in spam volume, much as the National Do-Not-Call registry caused a big drop in unwanted telemarketing calls.

You all may wish to go this route (it's called Blue Frog):

http://www.bluesecurity.com/company/about_us.asp?from=members

I've been using it for a few monrths, and the amount of unfiltered spam has dropped dramatically.

YMMV ..
Tom