Dealing with spam should be easy enough if you are willing to risk missing a letter or two from friends who have recently established a new e-mail address. I’m looking for a program that will do something like this:
A. Root through my Outlook Express folder and establish a really comprehensive list of every originating e-mail address for every message stored there, and everybody I have ever written to. (For some reason, my OE “Address Book” is never anywhere near complete - don’t know what the problem is, but it fails to pick up the addresses from most of the mail received and sent.) It would be nice if the resulting whitelist could subsequently be edited with a text editor.
B. Take every single message from an unknown sender and send it immediately to the garbage pile. There I can inspect it briefly if so inclined or just delete en masse. If I move something out of the garbage pile, I want it to be automatically added to the white list.
In other words, I don’t really care about the small probability of getting a meaningful communication from an address not on the list. That’s what telephones are for. Seems to me that by this point in the internet’s evolution, someone must have written a program like this, and I hope this post will lead me to it.
Take a look at Mail washer. Pretty sure Mozilla can do what you want, But If a filter stops even one legitimate email, then it’s failed, so they don’t do that by default.
The best way to stop email is to only give your email address to trusted people, if a website asks for an email address, give it a fake one, or a hotmail/yahoo one.
I use Mail Washer. I used in the hopes that by bouncing e-mails to the sender, I’d get removed from their list. Doesn’t really work when your e-mail address is sold to others at an exponential rate. I used to be 10 spams a day. Over the past six months it has increased to about 60 spams a day. Really, you only need a few people to get a hold of your e-mail address for it to be all over. My two mistakes were made a long time a ago: (1) publishing my real e-mail address in the DNS registry when I got a domain name and (2) publishing my real address on my Web site for spiders to collect.
So yes, I’m tired of spam because even with Mail Washer I still have to spend a lot of time screening. I would like a program that would do the following similar to what “pjm” talked about:
Create a whitelist that is based on my address book.
Add to a whitelist intelligently to e-mails that I’ve replied to, forwarded, etc.
Manage all other e-mails by boucing them back to the sender explaining that their e-mail was interpreted as SPAM. In the e-mail give them a chance to return the e-mail to me. At that point the original e-mail would appear in my inbox (I know there are a lot of server-based solutions for this on the market already. I just want a client-based one).
… This way I’d give the sender the chance to actually get through to me. It would block most all of the people who spam with thousands of mails. They don’t have the time to actually read the returns.
Thanks, I downloaded the MailWasher program and will give it a trial, however it looks like just adding an extra step. If I understand correctly, you first use mailwasher to screen the mail and then go to your regular e-mail program to dowload and read those messages you didn’t bounce. And the bouncing idea sounds risky - for spammers, any kind of feedback at all just constitutes proof that you exist. Blacklists - also mentioned prominently on the MailWasher site - are a discredited technology, because spammers generally come at you from a different phony address every time.
To rephrase my desiderata - I just want to split the known senders from the unknown senders immediately as they come down the pipe. I can deal with the first group right away and plod through the others at a time of my own choosing, (or not, as the case may be).
Has anyone else had problems with OE’s address book? This may be because periodically I overwrite my C: partition with a clean backup copy, just to keep control of what’s in there. But my OE folder is not on C: ! I guess the address book must not move when you move the storage area.