OT: Blocking spam

Hi everyone
Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around but
that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but it's
getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know by then my
mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block this stuff short of
having to change my e-mail address which I don't want to do.

Roseanne

--
The Seven Dwarves of Menopause are living at my house: Itchy,Bitchy,
Sweaty,Sleepy,Bloated,Forgetful & Psycho

foggydoggy wrote:
> Hi everyone
> Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around but
> that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but it's
> getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know by then my
> mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block this stuff short of
> having to change my e-mail address which I don't want to do.
>
> Roseanne
>
This may not be enough to help next week, but here are a few
suggestions for future prevention:

Get a gmail account http://gmail.google.com. They are free, and
they do a pretty good job of blocking spam. Get more than one.
Use one for your personal email, one for internet orders, one for
posting to usenet - and don't use that one for anything else.

Spoof your email address in the account that you use to post to
usenet. I do. You have to delete part of the address to send me
email at the address that I used to post this. Programs that
harvest that email address send spam to a nonexistent address.

Download and use Thunderbird as your email reader. It's free
here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ . It has some
fair (not great) spam filters, and you can also set up filters to
block repeat senders.

As far as next week goes: depending on what you use to read your
email, you might be able to set up some filters to help you sort
through it. (What program do you use to read your email?) You
might be able to set up your email program so that it downloads
only the headers (TO, FROM and SUBJECT) and not the message
bodies. Then you can look just at the headers and delete those
that you don't want to see and download the bodies from the rest.

If you have specific questions, delete dog from my email and I
can try to help.

FurPaw

--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

To reply, unleash the dog.

"foggydoggy" <foggydoggy@cogeco.ca> wrote in
news:gTzpi.1724$gn1.508@read1.cgocable.net:

> Hi everyone
> Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around
> but
> that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but
> it's getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know
> by then my mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block
> this stuff short of having to change my e-mail address which I don't
> want to do.

What email client do you use? Thunderbird? OE? There's a neat little
program that you put between your email client and the web. It grabs
your email from your account, evaluates it for spam, then adds a label to
it and sends it on to your email client. You will set up your email
client so that it reads the label and sorts it appropriately.

The evaluation is done by Bayesian filter, which learns whenever you mark
something 'spam'. In very short order you'll find it filters out 99+% of
spam.

It's called K9, and you can get it at keir.net.

Chak




--
Ninety-Ninety Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90%
of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the
other 90% of the development time.

"Chakolate" <chakolateDeathToSpammers@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns997842C33C1Cchakolatehotmailcom@207.115.17 .102...
> "foggydoggy" <foggydoggy@cogeco.ca> wrote in
> news:gTzpi.1724$gn1.508@read1.cgocable.net:
>
>> Hi everyone
>> Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around
>> but
>> that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but
>> it's getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know
>> by then my mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block
>> this stuff short of having to change my e-mail address which I don't
>> want to do.
>
> What email client do you use? Thunderbird? OE? There's a neat little
> program that you put between your email client and the web. It grabs
> your email from your account, evaluates it for spam, then adds a label to
> it and sends it on to your email client. You will set up your email
> client so that it reads the label and sorts it appropriately.
>
> The evaluation is done by Bayesian filter, which learns whenever you mark
> something 'spam'. In very short order you'll find it filters out 99+% of
> spam.
>
> It's called K9, and you can get it at keir.net.
>
> Chak

Okay ladies, thanks for advice but you're speaking Greek.

E-mail client? What's that?- I use Outlook Express and I gather OE above
means that. A friend of mine did something to their computer to filter
spam/porn and as a result now finds some of their legit emails don't come
through some of the time and have tried to fix it themselves and through the
server but to no avail, so now to ensure they get all their email have to
log onto the server.

Roseanne

>
> This may not be enough to help next week, but here are a few suggestions
> for future prevention:
>
> Get a gmail account http://gmail.google.com. They are free, and they do a
> pretty good job of blocking spam. Get more than one. Use one for your
> personal email, one for internet orders, one for posting to usenet - and
> don't use that one for anything else.

I already have opened a gmail account for use when I travel, but I do like
the e-mail address I have now.It's a hassle logging onto g-mail everytime
you want to use e-mail.

> Spoof your email address in the account that you use to post to usenet. I
> do. You have to delete part of the address to send me email at the
> address that I used to post this. Programs that harvest that email
> address send spam to a nonexistent address.

Spoof? Um, what's that? It sounds like you're disguising part of your
address. I told you guys I'm at the dummy level.

> Download and use Thunderbird as your email reader. It's free here:
> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ . It has some fair (not great)
> spam filters, and you can also set up filters to block repeat senders.
>
> As far as next week goes: depending on what you use to read your email,
> you might be able to set up some filters to help you sort through it.
> (What program do you use to read your email?) You might be able to set up
> your email program so that it downloads only the headers (TO, FROM and
> SUBJECT) and not the message bodies. Then you can look just at the
> headers and delete those that you don't want to see and download the
> bodies from the rest.
>
> If you have specific questions, delete dog from my email and I can try to
> help.
>
> FurPaw

Thanks, but I'm scared of screwing up my computer (see response to Chak) I
think I'll borrow one of my daughter's friends and ask him to fix it. He was
able to fix up a lot of her junk & gunk.He's away till end of August and I
guess I just have to deal with all the crap when I get back.

Thanks,
Roseanne

foggydoggy wrote:
> "Chakolate" <chakolateDeathToSpammers@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:Xns997842C33C1Cchakolatehotmailcom@207.115.17 .102...
>> "foggydoggy" <foggydoggy@cogeco.ca> wrote in
>> news:gTzpi.1724$gn1.508@read1.cgocable.net:
>>
>>> Hi everyone
>>> Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around
>>> but
>>> that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but
>>> it's getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know
>>> by then my mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block
>>> this stuff short of having to change my e-mail address which I don't
>>> want to do.
>> What email client do you use? Thunderbird? OE? There's a neat little
>> program that you put between your email client and the web. It grabs
>> your email from your account, evaluates it for spam, then adds a label to
>> it and sends it on to your email client. You will set up your email
>> client so that it reads the label and sorts it appropriately.
>>
>> The evaluation is done by Bayesian filter, which learns whenever you mark
>> something 'spam'. In very short order you'll find it filters out 99+% of
>> spam.
>>
>> It's called K9, and you can get it at keir.net.
>>
>> Chak
>
> Okay ladies, thanks for advice but you're speaking Greek.
>
> E-mail client? What's that?- I use Outlook Express and I gather OE above
> means that. A friend of mine did something to their computer to filter
> spam/porn and as a result now finds some of their legit emails don't come
> through some of the time and have tried to fix it themselves and through the
> server but to no avail, so now to ensure they get all their email have to
> log onto the server.
>
> Roseanne
>

Email client - the program you use to read your email. You're
using Outlook Express. I don't use OE, but I think it has some
filtering capability. That means that you can in effect say,
"don't show me email that was sent by xxxx" or "don't show me
email that contains 'abcdefg' in the subject line." You could
search the Outlook Express help for "filter" to see how to do it.

Regarding what your friend did: it's hard to tell you what to do
and what not to do without more details: What email program does
she use to read her email? What email server (that would be
things like her internet service provider, or hotmail, or gmail,
or yahoo mail) does she use? What did she do to set up the filter?

When you set up a spam filter, you set up a set of rules that are
always applied to every piece of email. For example, you might
say, "block all email that contains 'hot' or 'XXX' in the subject
line," because a lot of porn email contains those strings. But
that would also filter out email from a friend that had a subject
like "it's really hot today" or "Love and XXX on your birthday."
So your filter would be too broad.

Think about how you go through your paper junk mail. You
probably don't open all of it. You use criteria to decide what
to do: this looks like yet another credit card; shred it. This
looks like a letter from my aunt; open it. This looks like a
bill; open it - oops, it's a sales pitch! This looks like a
sales pitch; throw it out [but it was a bill]. You run into the
same problems with setting up email filters, but you have to be
more formal about specifying the 'rules' that you use to decide
whether email is spam or something you want to see.

Some ISPs, like Earthlink, let you set up very narrow filters, so
that you only receive email from people on your "safe" list. If
you get email from someone else, it is blocked and that person is
sent a message asking for more information (who are you? tell the
recipient more about yourself), and the response, if the sender
replies, is sent to you. At that point you can unblock either
the one message or all messages from the sender. It's a pain for
you and for anyone who sends you email who is not on your list,
but it is effective in blocking spam. (Thunderbird has a similar
capability, which I don't use: junk any email from people who
aren't in my "address book." You can then scan the 'junk' mail
headers to see if it's likely that there's something you want to
see. )

Roseanne, there's no easy answer to dealing with spam. Either
you let a lot through and don't miss messages you want to see, or
you put on tight filters and risk that you will miss messages.
That's why I suggested taking a multi-pronged approach (the one I
use) that includes prevention and more than one email address ,
which allows some spam, but not much. [It's been quite a while
since I was greeted with the sight of sexual organs when I opened
an email, so something is working!] I haven't tried K9 - I plan
to look for it to day, because it sounds like a good approach.

I think your best bet at this point is to check whether OE allows
you to download headers only, delete the headers that look like
spam, and then download only the remaining messages. Thunderbird
does this on one of it's options screens, and it's very easy to
set up. Maybe someone who uses OE can walk you through this.

FurPaw

--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

To reply, unleash the dog.

foggydoggy wrote:
>> This may not be enough to help next week, but here are a few suggestions
>> for future prevention:
>>
>> Get a gmail account http://gmail.google.com. They are free, and they do a
>> pretty good job of blocking spam. Get more than one. Use one for your
>> personal email, one for internet orders, one for posting to usenet - and
>> don't use that one for anything else.
>
> I already have opened a gmail account for use when I travel, but I do like
> the e-mail address I have now.It's a hassle logging onto g-mail everytime
> you want to use e-mail.

You don't have to log onto gmail. You can set up OE to contact
gmail automatically and download messages that have arrived.
There is information how to do that on the gmail web site:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3c7sl9

>> Spoof your email address in the account that you use to post to usenet. I
>> do. You have to delete part of the address to send me email at the
>> address that I used to post this. Programs that harvest that email
>> address send spam to a nonexistent address.
>
> Spoof? Um, what's that? It sounds like you're disguising part of your
> address. I told you guys I'm at the dummy level.

Right - when you post to usenet or respond to a post, you use a
fake email address. I can't tell you how to set this up without
knowing what program you are using when you post to asm, for example.

>> Download and use Thunderbird as your email reader. It's free here:
>> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ . It has some fair (not great)
>> spam filters, and you can also set up filters to block repeat senders.
>>
>> As far as next week goes: depending on what you use to read your email,
>> you might be able to set up some filters to help you sort through it.
>> (What program do you use to read your email?) You might be able to set up
>> your email program so that it downloads only the headers (TO, FROM and
>> SUBJECT) and not the message bodies. Then you can look just at the
>> headers and delete those that you don't want to see and download the
>> bodies from the rest.
>>
>> If you have specific questions, delete dog from my email and I can try to
>> help.
>>
>> FurPaw
>
> Thanks, but I'm scared of screwing up my computer (see response to Chak) I
> think I'll borrow one of my daughter's friends and ask him to fix it. He was
> able to fix up a lot of her junk & gunk.He's away till end of August and I
> guess I just have to deal with all the crap when I get back.
>
> Thanks,
> Roseanne
>
>


--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

To reply, unleash the dog.

foggydoggy wrote:

>
> Thanks, but I'm scared of screwing up my computer (see response to Chak)

You'd be surprised at how *little* damage you can actually do to your
computer, Roseanne!


--
Jette Goldie
jette@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.jette.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
http://wolfette.livejournal.com/
("reply to" is spamblocked - use the email addy in sig)

FurPaw wrote the following on 7/25/2007 9:04 AM:

> I think your best bet at this point is to check whether OE allows
> you to download headers only, delete the headers that look like
> spam, and then download only the remaining messages. Thunderbird
> does this on one of it's options screens, and it's very easy to
> set up. Maybe someone who uses OE can walk you through this.

Another nifty option is to use something like Mailwasher
(www.firetrust.net). I prefer being able to see everything and manually
delete the spam. I've seen too many legitimate messages caught in spam
filters to trust anyone else's filters. Mailwasher downloads the headers,
and makes it very easy to delete the spam and set up filters before the
mail is downloaded to your email reader -- Thunderbird, in my case. No
affiliation with either company, other than satisfied user.

Karen R.

FurPaw wrote:
> foggydoggy wrote:
>> "Chakolate" <chakolateDeathToSpammers@gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:Xns997842C33C1Cchakolatehotmailcom@207.115.17 .102...
>>> "foggydoggy" <foggydoggy@cogeco.ca> wrote in
>>> news:gTzpi.1724$gn1.508@read1.cgocable.net:
>>>
>>>> Hi everyone
>>>> Okay I'm a computer dummy. I can get on & off the net, surf around
>>>> but
>>>> that's about it. I've been receiving a lot of spam and I delete it but
>>>> it's getting worse and I will be away for 5 days next week and I know
>>>> by then my mailbox will be overloaded with crap, so how do I block
>>>> this stuff short of having to change my e-mail address which I don't
>>>> want to do.
>>> What email client do you use? Thunderbird? OE? There's a neat little
>>> program that you put between your email client and the web. It grabs
>>> your email from your account, evaluates it for spam, then adds a
>>> label to
>>> it and sends it on to your email client. You will set up your email
>>> client so that it reads the label and sorts it appropriately.
>>>
>>> The evaluation is done by Bayesian filter, which learns whenever you
>>> mark
>>> something 'spam'. In very short order you'll find it filters out
>>> 99+% of
>>> spam.
>>>
>>> It's called K9, and you can get it at keir.net.
>>>
>>> Chak
>>
>> Okay ladies, thanks for advice but you're speaking Greek.
>>
>> E-mail client? What's that?- I use Outlook Express and I gather OE
>> above means that. A friend of mine did something to their computer to
>> filter spam/porn and as a result now finds some of their legit emails
>> don't come through some of the time and have tried to fix it
>> themselves and through the server but to no avail, so now to ensure
>> they get all their email have to log onto the server.
>>
>> Roseanne
>
> Email client - the program you use to read your email. You're using
> Outlook Express. I don't use OE, but I think it has some filtering
> capability. That means that you can in effect say, "don't show me email
> that was sent by xxxx" or "don't show me email that contains 'abcdefg'
> in the subject line." You could search the Outlook Express help for
> "filter" to see how to do it.
>
> Regarding what your friend did: it's hard to tell you what to do and
> what not to do without more details: What email program does she use to
> read her email? What email server (that would be things like her
> internet service provider, or hotmail, or gmail, or yahoo mail) does she
> use? What did she do to set up the filter?
>
> When you set up a spam filter, you set up a set of rules that are always
> applied to every piece of email. For example, you might say, "block all
> email that contains 'hot' or 'XXX' in the subject line," because a lot
> of porn email contains those strings. But that would also filter out
> email from a friend that had a subject like "it's really hot today" or
> "Love and XXX on your birthday."
> So your filter would be too broad.


Agree - i use more specific words and they change from time to time.
It's worthwhile to see what the hot stupid terms are at the moment,
and block them by subject-line phrase:

IF subject line contains exact phrase:
"replica watches"
"grass seed" (What the bleep IS it, with the lawn-porn thing lately??)
"meet singles"
"las vegas" (Casinos are big recently)

send to trash.

The idea is that some variations on the phrases will get through
(like "meet sexy singles")
Unpredictable phrases will too ("get big like ron jeremy" - since i
wasn't...um...up on porn stars i never knew the name)
but it will cut the garbage down to a manageable level.

Hopefully your real email friends know not to use typical spammish
phrases - or wouldn't have occasion to. Though i had to train a
friend to quit sending emails titled "Hi!" 8~) And she still fell
for "You have won a prize from microsoft" - unbelievable!




>
> Think about how you go through your paper junk mail. You probably don't
> open all of it. You use criteria to decide what to do: this looks like
> yet another credit card; shred it. This looks like a letter from my
> aunt; open it. This looks like a bill; open it - oops, it's a sales
> pitch! This looks like a sales pitch; throw it out [but it was a
> bill]. You run into the same problems with setting up email filters,
> but you have to be more formal about specifying the 'rules' that you use
> to decide whether email is spam or something you want to see.
>
> Some ISPs, like Earthlink, let you set up very narrow filters, so that
> you only receive email from people on your "safe" list. If you get
> email from someone else, it is blocked and that person is sent a message
> asking for more information (who are you? tell the recipient more about
> yourself), and the response, if the sender replies, is sent to you. At
> that point you can unblock either the one message or all messages from
> the sender. It's a pain for you and for anyone who sends you email who
> is not on your list, but it is effective in blocking spam. (Thunderbird
> has a similar capability, which I don't use: junk any email from people
> who aren't in my "address book." You can then scan the 'junk' mail
> headers to see if it's likely that there's something you want to see. )
>
> Roseanne, there's no easy answer to dealing with spam. Either you let a
> lot through and don't miss messages you want to see, or you put on tight
> filters and risk that you will miss messages. That's why I suggested
> taking a multi-pronged approach (the one I use) that includes prevention
> and more than one email address , which allows some spam, but not much.
> [It's been quite a while since I was greeted with the sight of sexual
> organs when I opened an email, so something is working!] I haven't
> tried K9 - I plan to look for it to day, because it sounds like a good
> approach.
>
> I think your best bet at this point is to check whether OE allows you to
> download headers only, delete the headers that look like spam, and then
> download only the remaining messages. Thunderbird does this on one of
> it's options screens, and it's very easy to set up. Maybe someone who
> uses OE can walk you through this.
>
> FurPaw
>

All good advice!


--
pax,
ruth


Save trees AND money! Buy used books!
http://stores.ebay.com/Noir-and-More-Books-and-Trains

"Jette" <bosslady@scotlandmail.com> wrote in message
newsqIpi.3923$By5.3081@text.news.blueyonder.co.u k...
> foggydoggy wrote:
>
>>
>> Thanks, but I'm scared of screwing up my computer (see response to Chak)
>
> You'd be surprised at how *little* damage you can actually do to your
> computer, Roseanne!
>
>
> --
> Jette Goldie

Oh, I don't know??? (add leeriness) That "little" damage can cause big
headaches.

Roseanne

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:55:58 GMT, "Karen R." <krez56@gmail.com> wrote:

>FurPaw wrote the following on 7/25/2007 9:04 AM:
>
>> I think your best bet at this point is to check whether OE allows
>> you to download headers only, delete the headers that look like
>> spam, and then download only the remaining messages. Thunderbird
>> does this on one of it's options screens, and it's very easy to
>> set up. Maybe someone who uses OE can walk you through this.
>
>Another nifty option is to use something like Mailwasher
>(www.firetrust.net). I prefer being able to see everything and manually
>delete the spam. I've seen too many legitimate messages caught in spam
>filters to trust anyone else's filters. Mailwasher downloads the headers,
>and makes it very easy to delete the spam and set up filters before the
>mail is downloaded to your email reader -- Thunderbird, in my case. No
>affiliation with either company, other than satisfied user.
>

It is possible to see all messages in mailwasher.

R

Ratatosk, Jola

--

If you need to e-mail me, replace "don'tbother" with "zedicus"

"foggydoggy" <foggydoggy@cogeco.ca> wrote in
news:EKHpi.59877$KV1.4158@read2.cgocable.net:

> I already have opened a gmail account for use when I travel, but I do
> like the e-mail address I have now.It's a hassle logging onto g-mail
> everytime you want to use e-mail.
>

If it's just the address you want to keep, you can forward all your mail
automatically to gmail, let gmail filter it for you, then set up your
Outlook Express to send through gmail. You can even set up gmail so that
the mail looks like it comes from your other address.

Chak

--
Ninety-Ninety Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90%
of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the
other 90% of the development time.

nickelshrink <nickelshrink@yahoo.com> wrote in news:5gpat9F3gdk81U1
@mid.individual.net:

> Agree - i use more specific words and they change from time to time.
>

But that's what a Bayesian filter does. It examines every word in an
email, and scores it according to the words it contains. Say, for
example, that all the words in a spam email are scored as worth one, and
all the words in a good email are worth 99. After you train it for a
bit, it learns which emails are the ones *you* consider to be spam, and
marks those. It adds the scores of all the words, and divides by the
number of words. If the score is less than, say, 50, it's classified as
spam.

Filtering by a word you choose is a step, but it's not nearly accurate
enough.

Chak

--
Ninety-Ninety Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90%
of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the
other 90% of the development time.