This evening I discovered that one of my mail collection agents hasn’t been working since about February this year. It’s for an account that I’ve been trying to phase out, so I didn’t notice nothing was coming in from it.
When I re-enabled the agent this evening, there were just short of 15,000 messages waiting for me! A sample of the first thousand or so suggests that 99% of the messages are spam…so I’m busy downloading well over 14,000 spam messages #-o
wow that is a lot
does it feel like this?
:fatalfridge:
Spam,spam… i.e. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ddgarcia/spam.html
About 25% of mine I can’t even read if I wanted to, seems to be business oriented based on the odd word in english [quote]
it has been an hour - finished yet? 
Unless you think there is something there real, Just call your provider and have them delete it from the server. Save a lot of downloading.
Running your own Mail server can cure some of these ills… I only get about 2 or 3 spam message in my main inbox nowdays. The rest is marked as spam and ends up in a spam folder. which I look at once or twice a day and just delete the lot unless something got in there by mistake which is rarely…
POPfile does a rather fine job of sorting my spam out for me
Email Administration is one of my favorite things to do…
The spam that does show up in my home box is a smidgen of what was denied at the server and I never had to download at all. Last time I did stats on the server, more than 92% of all mail presented to it was spam, viral or bogus and denied before accepting. That means only 8% was accepted into the system as possible valid mail and of that 10% was marked as spam and forwarded to the user.
Same thing for the servers at work, though the precentage is lower, closer to 83%. At work, we have had no viral outbreaks since Dec 18th, 2003 when I turned on the new server system. They were a continual problem before then.
The mail servers are built the same way on the same type of platform with same base software etc… work does use Exchange servers inside, but they don’t touch the mail until the Unix gateway sees it first.
if only they could sort out and convict the spammers in the first place then we would not have to go through all this palaver about spam filtering 
It took about an hour to fully download.
I wasn’t sure if there was anything useful there. As it was I did find a few messsages that were of use. Downloading isn’t a problem…I’ve got bandwidth to spare. The reason I hadn’t noticed that the agent wasn’t running is because I do run my own mail server (aka the weather-watch.com server), complete with spam and anti-virus checking/quarantining…
What’s involved in runnig your own mail server on a windows platform?
From my prespective… Don’t. At least not on Windows.
I’ve not found a single windows based platform mail server that is properly RFC compliant, secure and can do the simple things needed to deal with mail being handed to it from the Internet. I’m not a Unix bigot, I use windows servers for other things, but for a mail server is not one of them.
Properly setting up a mail server also requires knowlege of how email works, RFC’s that govern mail interaction, how an MTA works vs a MUA, and Idea of how viruses can be transported, how to read mail headers and mail logs etc… Its not real hard stuff and it can actually be a lot of fun if you are twisted enough to enjoy looking at mail logs on a regular basis.
If you are interested in what we use for mail servers covering small companies to very large corporations give me a PM and we can take the discussion offline. BTW this is not purchased software but solid good open source software that you can put together for free, so there is nothing to buy… just spending some of your time.
ok then - if you are running windows and all that stuff mentioned above by Kevin goes right over your head you could do no worse than look at POPfile if you use the main email clients out there to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
I have been running it for over a year and it is now currently over 99% effective in sorting out my spam for me. Although at the start you have to tell it what is spam and what is not as you go along as it reads every word in each email and builds up spam probabilties from that.
so far out of about 31,000 emails it has identified 26,000 as spam 8O
There are also versions for Linux and the Mac, and it is free.
I personally think this story is funny but not the wife. i have a hotmail account and when my wife sent me an email from her work it went to the spam bin, but i still got the porno ads. i told my wife ,wow, how did it know how to properly filter my emails and filter out the crap!! 
obviously she didnt think it was funny!!
I think that it is very funny :lol: , however, I am not the one that may end up sleeping on the couch that night
I just sent a guy an email but before I could send him an email he had to add me as a valid sender. This seems like a good solution. Do any of you guys know how this works?
Validation can work, but there has been at least one case that I’ve experienced of an email validation company using the email addresses of people confirming their details to send out spam adverts about their validation service. As a result, I refuse to validate myself in virtually all cases now.
i also hate certified emails…
unless you sign up for that, i have to start a new reply to that email,
Chris,
Are there any services that run on a personal pc that would allow the user to setup a list of of allowable emails?