Anyone expecting some sort of Monty Python....lobster thermador au cravatte served in a provencale manner garnished with a fried egg on top and SPAM!......

This isnt it (damn good sketch tho, those vikings get me every time :D)

Getting summat like 54 spam msg in my email every day! a bizzarre mixture of porn and dating agencies and occaisionally random ones asking me to do surveys for cash! not entirely sure when and how I managed to subscribe to these places but they wont leave me alone!

Best spam was someone offering 12lbs of lobster and another was 10lbs of Omagh steak! :loopy:

whats the best spam you ever had?

54?! :o Oh I wish..

I'm getting an average of 250 email messages a day... of those around 30 are forum notification, 2 email from friends or clients... The rest are Pythonesque in the extreme...

My worst day was after taking 2 days off and getting over 1000 pieces of junk in my email box...

for spam check out www.spampal.org - works for me

and it is free

Spamming is now illegal in the EU. Not that it'll make an enormous amount of difference because mos spam comes from the States.

Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/) is another excellent anti-spam tool - you can set up a blacklist and get the program to automatically bounce any mails from blacklisted domains, and also set up a friends list which means those emails will always get through.

The junk email filter in Outlook 2003 seems to work quite well too, but I'd rather delete spam before it gets onto my pc - mailwasher deletes mail at the server rather than on your pc.

Another great tool to help prevent getting spam in the first place is to use spamgourmet (http://www.spamgourmet.com). I'm not going to explain how it works in detail here but basically it lets you set up disposable email addresses that point to your real email address. Once the disposable address has been used a specified number of times, it's deleted. It's ideal for when you need to use your email address to gain access to websites, mailing lists, etc but you suspect that the site may not be too scrupulous with your address.

Originally posted by Sidla
Spamming is now illegal in the EU. Not that it'll make an enormous amount of difference because mos spam comes from the States.

So the idiots in Downing Street create, using loads of taxpayers' money, a new Minister for Spam and another gang of civil servants, a new talking shop to deal with a problem totally outside their legal control. :mad:

Just like the time we had a Drugs Czar, Keith Helliwell and finished up having more drugs than ever.

Well i heard that they tried to pass an Anti-Spam legislation in the US but it was opposed by a huge P*nis enlargement lobby.

:o :o :o

heheheheheheheheheheheheh

Wilf

Originally posted by Mike
Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/) is another excellent anti-spam tool - you can set up a blacklist and get the program to automatically bounce any mails from blacklisted domains, and also set up a friends list which means those emails will always get through.

Mailwasher is good, but AFAIK you need to run it before you check your mail each time, to clean out your pop box. This saves you enormous amounts of downloading if you are on a dial-up type connection.

Spampal (www.spampal.org) acts as a proxy mail server filtering all the traffic between your client and your mailserver.

The autoupdating blacklists catch at least 80% of the mail, and the bayesian statistical language plugin gets the rest.

The bayesian plugin gets everything, but needs training. I get a false positive message now and again, but it is very rare indeed now.

Spampal would not save you much time downloading spam (which some would argue is the whole point - freeing up bandwidth and storage space), but it does completely remove it from your inbox.

Use a desktop mail server (like VPOP3) to collect your email first and quarantine attachments and stuff, and place spampal between VPOP3 and your external mailservers.

Yes, you run Mailwasher before doing a "send and receive" at your email client. It sounds like Spampal and Mailwasher do similar things, but at a different place.
I've found that after running MW for a while, I don't actually do that many send/receives any more - I just wait for a bunch of real emails to accumulate, then get them a few times a day. Anything that gets through MW gets caught by the Outlook 2003 junk mail filter.

It also works with my Norton AV too which is nice.

I agree with a previous poster that the new UK anti-spam laws will have little actual affect on the amount of rubbish I get sent since most of it seems to originate from the USA and is no doubt piped through various proxies that reside in countries without any such legistlation.

To stop Spam, a worldwide effort is necessary. It certainly has almost ruined email as a convenient and easy to use communication tool though.

Ta for all the advice peeps! :D
Im on Yahoo and it normally filters all spam into bulk folder I used to just delete it but now mates are getting diverted to bulk folder so I have to check it each time before I empty it! :mad:

Even better some of the spam is working its way into inbox so I have to check it in order to confirm its spam!

Had all these spam preventative things and Norton but screwed up computer summat chronic. had two antivirus programmes fighting with each other thinking other one was a virus! :loopy:

Ah....computer technology!

Originally posted by Mosherchik
Had all these spam preventative things and Norton but screwed up computer summat chronic. had two antivirus programmes fighting with each other thinking other one was a virus! :loopy:
Erm... that's your own bad I'm afraid... it's always recommended that you only ever install one anti-virus program on a single machine otherwise they clash and can let stuff through...

Whole other topic I know but never install more than one AV system on your machine... not good ;)

Aint my 'puter is Dads :)
His bad really!

My 'puter is a v old Olivetti Laptop that I dont use often cos its buried under so much crap on my desk and it doesnt like me anyway! Performs more illegal operations than Saddam Hussain! (Ooooo topical!) :o

Anywayz back to the grindstone. Gonna get this essay finished today!

:thumbsup:

Originally posted by Lickszz
Just like the time we had a Drugs Czar, Keith Helliwell and finished up having more drugs than ever.
The government knew their stated target of "halving drug use in 10 years" wouldnt work so they hired Hellawell as a fall guy. The sad thing is he didnt realise his job was to take the blame and be fired, so he actually tried quite hard. Politics, eh.

The economics of spam are that 99.999% just gets deleted but 0.001% get a response. If you send out 10,000,000 at minimal cost then its worth it. I only get a few spam mails a week and whenever possible I telephone the spammer, waste their time and, if possible, their money. (eg, get samples posted or have a long discussion). The aim is to make spam uneconomic because the spammer has to filter out the spam responses!

I've been successful in minimising spam by not putting my address anywhere that an automated robot can pick it up, and by using a disposable address method. By going to a site like www.virtualnames.co.uk (http://www.virtualnames.co.uk) you can buy your own domain name. You then get any.address@mydomain.co.uk for yourself. Then when I register on things that I think might generate spam, I use an email address like somesite@mydomain.co.uk. If I start getting mail to that address from other companies then I know who has sold my address. Depending on the company and whether they have a stated privacy policy, I telephone them or just redirect that disposable email address back to them.

Also, a law was passed on 12th Dec that prohibits sending you email or SMS without your express permission (it's opt-IN not opt-out). If anyone can tell me what the law is called or point me to more details then I would be greatful!

This is the official blurb about the new SPAM laws Garrence (http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/eventual.aspx?id=783)

HTH

Just got one for spam removal software which made me laugh:

Subject: FWD: Stop emails like this one..