I love my kill-filters!

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38 junk mails received out of 141 emails that got to me. A further 113 were refused w/out even reaching my computer!! What delight to watch the log window, as random letter string (at) aol dot com after random letter string (at) aol dot com gets thee ole "message rejected on content, delivery not authorised" routine!! Kill filters = r0x0r!@#

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Anyone else use the Google toolbar? It has a pop-up killer (yes, I know there are other more clever ways to kill them and I'm an asshat for using IE6) that works quite nicely. Sorry, back to topic.

― Bryan (Bryan), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:36 (twenty-two years ago)

i just installed spamnet for outlook and it's a dream

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:37 (twenty-two years ago)

any links?

― Dean Gulberry (deangulberry), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:38 (twenty-two years ago)

pop-up killers are generally a bad idea because they supress all sorts of windows that you reasonably WANT to appear while surfing the interweb. that said, if you stay away from geocities sites and pr0n sites, i don't see why pop-ups would be a major issue anyway...

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:38 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't ever get spam ever, wtf? And my actual email address is all over everywhere!

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:38 (twenty-two years ago)

i never used to get any until i made the mistake of following a tip from a normally otm source and giving my email address to a 'free magazine subscription' engine. since then it's been nothing but misery.

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:40 (twenty-two years ago)

and dean, assuming you were asking me: http://www.cloudmark.com/

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:41 (twenty-two years ago)

I think I enjoy the pop-up killer for sites like car company sites and ESPN and stuff like that. Otherwise yes Mark, you're right.

― Bryan (Bryan), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:43 (twenty-two years ago)

Share yr kill filter keywords here, anyway. Mine:

"nfay"
"erect10n"
"pharm/acy"
"prescr1pt10n"
"prescr1pt1on"
"p@*is"
"medicines"
"apcalis"
"gangbang"
"junk email"
"s-e.x"
"SPA M" (note gap)
"livecam"
"meds"
"fa_t"
"vi-agra"
"i choose to live life free of"
"prescription drugs"
"prescription medication"
"penis enlargement"
"unwanted emails"
"vi/\gra"
"getting nailed"
"penis patch"
"via.gra"
"V.I,A.G,R.A"
"via/gra"
"^"
"v1@gr"
"med" (but with umlaut over the 'e')
(email address that sends dodgy hate mail)
"cu.rn"
"curn"
"pharmacy"
"perscription" (note misspelling)
"fioricet"
"teen"
"vicodin"
"viagr"
"v1agra"
"sildenafil citrate"
"xanax"
"[ADV]"
"sukn"
"fukn"
"alerts" (heh, heh, heh)
"viagra"

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:43 (twenty-two years ago)

how do you set up a killfile anyway?

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:44 (twenty-two years ago)

"unwanted emails"

this is my favorite!

― bad jode (Jody Beth Rosen), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:45 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd say that the caret (^) and the nfay (my main address = nfay@ fay.....etc) kills most of it.

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:45 (twenty-two years ago)

ha, I got loads of junk w/ "stop unwnated emails" as the subj header! the cheek!!

I'm using win xp at work, and I started getting that windows messenger spam pop up, that basically says 'pay us money to stop pop up ads like this one' when it's the only pop up ad that comes down. A plug in for ad-aware stopped it.

I don't know how to set up email rejection in anything other than demon turnpike which is the really good little mail app you get when you use demon internet as yr isp. On that, it's CONFIGURE|EMAIL ROUTING, then you select the tab for mail rejection, and you can set up rules, using keywords (as above), email addresses etc, and best of all is that it stops the junk from even d/ling into yr computer. Try looking at the help page on outlook express (if that's what yr using) and search for killfile, mail routing, mail rejection, server side deletion and suchlike. It's well worth the effort to set up - as you can tell, It makes me happy!!

Aha, another one for the killfile list:

"s-e/x"

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:53 (twenty-two years ago)

mark p, i was asking you. thanks :)

― Dean Gulberry (deangulberry), Monday, 24 November 2003 20:56 (twenty-two years ago)

pop-up blockers are the best!

― s1utsky (slutsky), Monday, 24 November 2003 21:27 (twenty-two years ago)

i kill my love-philtres

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 24 November 2003 21:33 (twenty-two years ago)

thanks for the google toolbar suggestion. what a gem.

― Dean Gulberry (deangulberry), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:12 (twenty-two years ago)

A lot of these spams about unwanted spam, I noticed, actually say 'Are you SEEK of spam?' I'm still trying to figure out how anyone is supposed to be dumb enough to not see through it. Quite amusing in a way. OTOH, I get an increasing amount of spam with simply the subject line 'hi' these days, which forces me to open the fuckers in case it's feedback off my Web site or something. (Ironically, I actually got a mail today that looked 100% like spam, i.e. odd subject line, but was a comment about the Web site!)

― ChrissieH (chrissie1068), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Selected highlights from my spam filters (some of these are old and out-of-date but I keep them for old time's sake):

your rod
college degree
hey
hi
does matter
income
DID YOU KNOW
v1agra
increase the size
look and feel
loan
cable
megan
increase your
Dolly Herring
schlong
spamcop

The last one is the most effective because it picks up anything with 'listed at spamcop' in the headers. Gets rid of 70% at a stroke.

― David (David), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:31 (twenty-two years ago)

Also this is probably a stupid question but why does a lot of spam have random bits of text tacked on the end of the subject line (eg
Trading pics in my chat yahcpxbmojfbbepxrxwmmcnkbrtrqnuq)? It just identifies it as spam (if the subject proper was no clue in itself).

― David (David), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Might not 'hey' and 'hi' take out some non-spam as well?

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Quite possibly. I'm not that bothered but I should probably delete all the filters except the spamcop one as the others don't pick up much what with all the creative mispellings around.

― David (David), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:44 (twenty-two years ago)

spamnet is cool because it 'recognizes' and automatically eliminates 90% of my junkmail by cross-referencing all incoming emails with a dynamically-updated spam database, which is in turn maintained by spamnet's userbase.

this means that ensuant spammy etymological workarounds like "c.u.mm" and "v1agra" aren't nearly as effective as they once were, a neat thing that, in turn, necessitates a further acceleration of word invention and morphology which, at the proper rate of speed, might ultimately result in an innocent recipe for oatmeal cookies being the spamspeak analogue to some really filthy proposition and therefor banished to the delete folder.

i like this idea for a lot of reasons, but mostly because i hate hate hate oatmeal cookies

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, 24 November 2003 22:50 (twenty-two years ago)

on the downside, i have just now realized that i have missed out on IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT YOUR COLON jc c rdqexhl

― mark p (Mark P), Wednesday, 26 November 2003 17:47 (twenty-two years ago)

My colon?

― NA (Nick A.), Wednesday, 26 November 2003 17:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Re random bits of text at the end:

Some filtering methods look at all the text in the email message, and for each "spammy" word, they assign the email a point. Then the email gets a score, ie "5 spam words : 90 words in message total" and if the score is over a certain threshold, the filter marks it as spam. So to try to trick these filters, the spammers tack on junk words on the end... so that it will raise the total words count, but they have it random so that the words are guaranteed not to be marked as spam words & raise the spam word count.

― lyra (lyra), Thursday, 27 November 2003 03:57 (twenty-two years ago)

A bit self-defeating because as soon as I see yahcpxbmojfbbepxrxwmmcnkbrtrqnuq in the subject line I know it's spam, regardless of how plausible the rest of the subject line is (not that it often is that plausible).

I wonder, is there likely to be a drop-off in certain kinds of spam as two things happen:

1. the proportion of people (receivers) aware of what it is and how to filter it out steadily increases.

2. the subject lines become so ludicrous and distorted (as they are already getting) that they cease to have even the tiniest resemblance to something legitimate.

If a lot of it is filtered out and then 99.999% of the rest is deleted manually without being read, isn't there some threshold of economic non-viability that could end up being crossed? It obviously hasn't reached that point yet but I wondered if it's conceivable that it could.

― David (David), Thursday, 27 November 2003 06:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Spammers vs. filters (human and mechanised) really is a great war. It's like watching viruses mutate.

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 27 November 2003 09:32 (twenty-two years ago)

I can't put "hi" in my kill filter list, b/c two of my wife's friends email her regularly, and they usually put "hi" as the subject. Sometimes I think I shd just put any address at aol dot com in the list, b/c nearly all of it seems to come w/a spoofed aol address. I'm suprised aol isn't trying to do s.th. abt it, I mean this will be harming aols "good name", won't it? ;)

― Pashmina (Pashmina), Thursday, 27 November 2003 09:45 (twenty-two years ago)

A while ago, I read great things about Bayesian mail filtering software, which learns to recognise spam with increasing accuracy. There's an Outlook plugin that employs it called Spammunition, I think. Does anyone have any experience of it?

― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 27 November 2003 10:02 (twenty-two years ago)

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