Can anyone recommend a provider for a “spam filtering email account” service?
Ideally, that account would provide forwarding service to my regular email account. Hence, by giving out that account name (or having it printed on my namecards), it would only forward valid emails to my regular account, and all the advertisements for home-based money making opportunitites, genital enlargement, colon cleansers, dating services, vitamins, fake college diplomas, phoney Microsoft update packages, bogus Pay Pal expiry notices, low interest loans, comprehensive debt consolidation, new investment opportunities, digital cable descramblers, Canadian pharmaceuticals, Japanese nude CDs, money-making tips for Ebay, asset background searches, Hong Kong vacation promotions, generic viagra, etc., etc. would be filtered out.
My Hinet account is gradually getting to the point where it is unusable due to the vast amounts of spam received.
However, I also note that there is no way which I can restrict my email program to only accept email from a known list of correspondents. I believe this is true for any of us who are Moderators on forumosa.com (formerly Segue.com, formerly Oriented.com) and hence who are available for correspondence to the greater internet community.
I got some email from a company called Bigfoot which offered spam-filtering email accounts . . . . . but when I sent them an email for further information, and asked a couple of questions, they never replied. (I guess Taiwan is not a big concern of the international community at present . . . . . . )
The Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail reader is supposed to be quite good at filtering spam.
But as you’re already getting so much spam, you might want to think about gradually shifting over to another e-mail address – or even more than one.
Also, you have a Web hosting account with Dreamhost, don’t you? They offer unlimited e-mail aliases. These can be quite useful for avoiding spam. Set up your e-mail so everything automatically gets sent to one e-mail account. Then use aliases whenever you register on a Web site. If you start getting spam to one of the aliases, just set the address so it will bounce everything back to the sender.
But the most important thing is never ever put your e-mail address on a Web page without encoding it first.
MAILWASHER seems to be popular. The only foolproof way to stop spam is to not let spammers get your email address. Only give your Hinet address to people you know and trust. Use a yahoo or hotmail address for regisitering on websites, you can always scrap them and get a new one. My throwaway accounts are full with spam, whilst my Hinet one only gets a couple, because I was stupid enough to trust some well known Taiwanese companies with my real address, including some from Hinet and connected companies.
Basically, if you don’t want spam, keep your address secret, which is probably not helpful in your line of work.
I use Easyspace for domain registration, and they provide email to that domain (eg hostmaster@domain.com). This email (in the Elite package) provides for spam filtration and anti-virus protection on the server side, ie you don’t have to download the crap.
It can insert a SpamSheildScore header into the email, which it will either file under “spam” on the server side, or leave in your email inbox. When you log in, mailwasher can be trained to check for the “SpamShieldScore” header, and if it’s there, mark the email for deletion. In mailwasher you can preview the email without downloading it (to check it really is spam) and if it is delete it from the server without downloading it.
After ensuring there’s no shite in yer inbox, then you can instruct outlook to download the email.
I have a domain name you can have if you like, and transfer ownership to you, Richard, and this (having been registered with them for some time) would allow you to receive email without spam, or of course you could register any domain you like. I’ll pm you.
I believe they provide spam filtering at the server, so the crap never gets to you. I have never needed to activate it, because I take the measures described above to prevent my name getting out.
Can you set up a forwarder on your hinet account, so that your email gets directed to another address with a filter? Getting people to update their address books is not a very efficient process.
Messages to my old email address get redirected to the new one, and the sender gets an auto-response notifying them of my updated details. You might not want to do that until you have filtered out the crap, but the great thing with owning your own domain is that you can have endless numbers of temporary accounts.
hartzell.com and hartzell.info are both currently available, and would cost you US$40 for 12 months with all the goodies you can use, plus excellent customer support.
I registered my own domain name and use 8-95.com twice a year plan. You can activate SpamAssasin or some other spam filtering tools on any email account you set up there. I’m not sure if it can just forward the non-spam emails though. Haven’t tried that.
Some nice things are that you get web space and email addresses at your domain name for about $30 a year, along with web mail.
Hey Answerer, thanks for the 8-95.com tip a while back – they have worked out well for me.
Richard, you can also use a free email account from Yahoo. They have pretty good spam-detection stuff, and quarantine it to a separate “folder”.
If you go with Yahoo’s pay service, you can download the email through POP. If you stick with free service only, then you’ll have to forward the mail to yourself – but it should be fairly straightforward to write a Perl script to automate that.
One advantage of Yahoo is that you can scrap an address after it becomes too spam-clogged to function any longer.
I guess I am unable to make myself clear. I do not want to have different email addresses, and “scrap” one when it gets too clogged. I am a Moderator on Forumosa and also am involved with many other activities, in addition to dealing with a lot of individuals in regard to their LEGAL PROBLEMS IN TAIWAN. I want to have an email address for legitimate email communication. I want to have the spam filtered out.
Hence, I might consider getting a forwarding type of email account with some appropriate email provider, (which would provide full spam protection), and then always give that as my email address. In actuality, that email account would forward to my real email address, (after filtering out all the junk) which would probably be on Chunghwa’s hinet.
I installed Mailwasher several months ago. I cannot see that it does anything significant. I conscientiously “bounced” spam emails back for several weeks using that program, however the spam emails continued to flood in. They did not stop by any means.
Mailwasher does not seem to have any sort of learning algorithm, so I still have to go in and manually review all incoming email. My desire is that any of the following should be immediately deleted #1: Any sort of spam, based on known keywords, #2: Any email with virus attached, #3: Any email with an .exe file attached, #4: any email with attachments over a certain size . . . . . etc., etc.
After using Mailwasher for a few months, I became totally disenchanted. The basic conceptualization of that program is that if you “bounce” the email back, you won’t receive any more spam, but since all the spam is using phoney addresses now, that formulation does not work.
If I am overlooking some good aspect of the Mailwasher program, please let me know.
Viruses are not spam, so get a proper virus scanner - one that updates itself automatically.
You can download the AVG Free Edition for free, it can be configured to check & certify *) incoming and outgoing emails, as well to perform regular scans and check for updates (automatically or manually). It also has the ability to clean / heal infected emails or their attachments.
Using it since two years and NEVER had a problem with virus infection, a few got detected before they could do any harm.
*) Personally I switched the certification off, but the check is still performed.
Because Yahoo US is a little bit slow (compared with those in Taiwan), you may need to forward mail or utilize pop3 to put mail anywhere in Taiwan. However Yahoo may not filter mail from other ISP and I am not satisfied with its accuracy.
I guess you have to keep your mail on the Server, right?
If so, the only thing you have to do is finding an excellent ISP.
If not, my experience is that Cloudmark’s SpamNet works with outlook very good. Its accuracy is very high. The only shortcoming is that you have to pay for it, but it’s worthwhile.