10.25.06
I don’t know about all of you out there, but I have been dealing with an inordinate amount of spam lately. Spam in my inbox, spam on my forums, people calling me about spam, e-mailing me about spam… So I have decided to fight back and do something about it.I have had two different sorts of spam. SPAM bots on forums I provide, and spam in e-mail. (Most of us do I believe.) I have done some research and to date seem to have stopped, or at least quelled for the moment, the spam posts on infected forums. www.spitwspots.com/phpbb/, and (unrelated), www.thecramerfamilyreunion.com/phpbb/. I was the victim of spam bots, or programs designed to crawl the web looking for places to post commercial messages. I found a script that seems to have stopped it for now. I’ll also be ever more vigilant in the future as well.
As for Spam in the inbox, with the help of our web hosting company, www.Bluehost.com, I found an open source solution called SPAM Assassin www.spamassassin.org and have implemented it on the mail server for SPITwSPOTS and all people who have an e-mail address through us here. The good news is that this seems to be doing about half the job. The bad news is it seems to being doing about half the job. UPDATE: I have just turned on a feature called SPAMbox that aids in the auto filtering of the spam you are receiving. (This may be the other half.) If you wish to use your pop3 e-mail client to check the spam box, just add “/spam” (without the quotes) to the end of your pop3 login. (Example: yourname@spitwspots.com/spam). Call me @ 299.4052 if you need help with this.
From the documentation I have read so far, it seems to work along these lines: When using Outlook, Outlook Express, Macintosh Mail, or most email user agents, there should be a way to mark messages as “Junk”. When you do, your user agent sends a note to SPAMassassin on the mail server and it flags or tags all the info about the email. When it gets five warnings of the same info, it blocks it. So this is a “community effortâ€. Aaron has seen these EXACT SAME SPAMS on users’ computers that ARE NOT A PART OF THE SWS NETWORK. Meaning, this is rampant on MOST networks right now, and working together, we can each help rid ourselves this annoyance.
I found another layer of protection, one you can implement yourself, should you find SPAMassassin not getting the WHOLE job done. In a quick Google search, I found two programs that stood out as good spam blockers that work in conjunction with your user agent. It turns out that users of Outlook Express do not have a “report spam†feature, so here are two programs that add this feature. I have used SPAMbully for about 24 hrs as of this post, and I can say that I have gone from 15-18 spam’s per day, or 1 every hour or so, to 1 in the last 18 hours, and have not seen any since. Something here is working, and doing it’s job well. This program is also very easy to use. I plan on removing the program, seeing if the spam returns, then testing SPAMfighter to see how that works. I’ll post how the tests go.
And let me say loud and clear: I AM NOT A SPAM EXPERT! I can use all the knowledgeable help I can get. It would be great to see some forum participation, so I have created a Spam! topic for users to post questions, help tactics, personal stories and such. I believe it’s going to take an amount of cooperation to effectively battle this global phenomenon.
…And to those of you who know who you are….IF YOU’RE BUYING VIAGRA, REPLICA WATCHES, AND PIRATED SOFTWARE, STOP! THIS IS EXACTLY WHY THESE PEOPLE CONTINUE TO DO THIS TO US. BECAUSE IT IS PROFITABLE. IF WE TAKE AWAY THE PROFIT, BY NOT BUYING THIS CRAP, THEY WILL STOP!
Eh hem.
Excuse me.
My apologies for the rant. (I now step down from soapbox)
I’ll meet you all in the forums and we’ll work this out if it’s been a problem for you, too.
Respect,
Brian “PunK” Ormond
webmaster@spitwspots.com