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Spam
Some people enlighten the day by making a toy out of spam for blogs.
But to me spam is just a big annoyance.
Especially in my mailbox. (My blog is well protected by TypePad, one of the advantages of being hosted rather than maintain the system by yourself...)
I am closing down some of my email addresses because of the amount of spam.
Anyone offering tips on how to protect my mailbox (for Apple Mail that is)
I am about to consider this system that asks verification from everyone, because, really, things are getting on my nerves...
Update: checked with my mailhost (www.webservice.be, the best, hosts all my important mailadresses)
Hey said spammers found a new way to go past viruscheckers. something veryvery technical (hey, I am a nerd, but not such a nerd ;) ) But the problem should be solved.
But I am not the only one complaining about an overload of spam these days... Hope they have a good mailhost too...
Technorati Tags: spam
Posted on September 1, 2006
in Limit of my knowledge
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Comments (4)
Comments
Use a professional hoster (like Openminds) for your mailserver, who can filter the spam on the server-level.
(Oh, and check your link on the first sentence.)
Posted by Bart | September 1, 2006 1:49 PMRecently spammers started using sliced images to spread their messages. The slicing is different in every mail. The problem is that images are very hard to interpret and can't be 'read' by a program. New and complex software is needed to be able to process and compare images and calculate their similarity/difference.
As a start, images could be interpreted by OCR software, but because they're sliced, this won't work very well. So first the images should be puzzled together, then OCR-ed and then compared to previous spam-images. As you can realise this requires a lot of processing time and currently no spam filter does this.
Gmail, which has one of the best spam catchers fails on detecting these kind of spam messages and I see a daily increase of such type of messages.
Your suggestion on the verification is great but won't work with newsletters.
Posted by Bart | September 1, 2006 3:41 PM- Forward your mail to a Gmail account.
- If you want to keep using your desktop mail program for mail, retrieve your (filtered) Gmail over POP:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=1555
I use Gmail for some 2 years now, have an account for both private and work mail.
I also answer my mail using Gmail with a customized from address (see http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/08/31/gmail-sender-header-makes-custom-from-address-useless-for-mailinglists/ ).
In the last month, Gmail filtered out 730 spam mails on my private account...
Posted by Pascal Van Hecke | September 3, 2006 12:51 PMUpdate: Spamassassin has an OCR plugin:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/OcrPlugin
Posted by Bart | September 7, 2006 2:06 PM