Spam Filter

ando

Right, I've been looking for a good spam filter solution for the last while now for my POP email account using Outlook XP. This is the best one I've come across so far, and for people that want to know, this is how to set it up:

1) Download All-In-One SecretMaker and install
2) Activate spam filter from the program. (tick 'spam filter on')
3) Open Outlook, Create a folder called Junk as a subfolder of the inbox



4) Within Outlook, setup the following rule...

"Apply this rule after the message arrives
with SPAM in the subject
move it to the junk folder"

5) To make life easier, I made a batch file to start both the Secretmaker program and Outlook one after the other via one click.

Within Notepad:

START C:\path to secretmaker program\secretmaker.exe
START C:\path to outlook\outlook.exe

Save as email.bat

6) When you turn your pc on in the morning/evening, you simply click on the email.bat file and your emails will be delivered to the inbox folder, spam to the junk folder.



Its worked fantastic for me so far, only 1 legitimate email was sent to the junk box because there was an Html attachment

Seth Brundle

I prefer mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) as I have the option of deleting the mail &/or sending the spammer a bounced mail message.
With your system you still have to download the spam (some with virii) and as there is no bounced message the spammer will presume your email addy is valid.

ando

eye, good point. I must try that one out aswell. If anyone has any apps that they know of, plz tell

ToxicPaddy

Along the same lines as this thread, what would you recommend for a small office,
only 4 users that are getting a lot of spam mail lately and need a good spam
filter that will run safely on the e-mail server, not too expensive and pretty reliable.

They dont have a big budget and they're not a very IT intensive business so only
using cmail as their e-mail server. So there is very limited filtering available with it
but its reliable and fairly easy to administer.

Anyone any suggestions?

ando

good filters seem to be rare for local lan email servers. I came across one when I followed kbannon link (30 day trial), I've tried it here on an exchange 5.5 server. It does the job, but its very messy

ToxicPaddy

Id prefer something very straight forward to be honest. Cmail only allows you to add
domains or email addresses manually but this can go on forever and as I said there
arent any IT people in the office just a guy who does the most basic of stuff.

Da Man

I use MailWasher and I'm not all that happy with it. I would say about 50% of spam gets through no matter what I do. I don't think it can filter HTML e-mail content particularly successfully and the bouncing and blacklisting features are pretty worthless too. And if I mistakingly consider something spam, I have no way of ever getting the e-mail back.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

rom1

- SpamPal.
Excellent personal anti-spam sofware. I have used it extensively and got very good results. It's very well maintained and constantly improved though add-ons.
By the way, boucing is a bad idea as most of the email addresses used by spammers are spoofed or forged nowadays...

- SpamAssassin.
Spam filter for the email server. It's free and open source and is used in many comercial products (http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CommercialProducts

IronMan

The main problem that i have with Mailwasher is the fact that you can bounce messages back. This may have worked one time, but now most spammers spoof email address and use other tactics, so you end up bouncing the message back to a non existant address or in some cases the address of a poor misfortunate who had his account used. Not ideal. Spam should be blocked at the server.

Seth Brundle

How can you accurately block it at the server?
I don't think there is a 100% sure fire way of blocking spam without doing it manually.
I use mailwasher and no spam gets onto my pc.
Personally, I don't care who gets the bounced messages.

BigEejit

For personal filtering at work I use Spambayes .. as you can guess it uses bayesian filtering and in three months it has let through 2 spams and didnt falsely pick out any legitimate emails ... very good

Like all bayesian filters you have to train it, so keep those spams and put them in a folder, when you have a good few, install spambayes, it'll ask for samples of spam and then ask for legitimate emails .... after that you should be running good .....
Beware spams that contain nothing but random words/letters ... if they pass the filter just delete them, they are specifically designed to fuck up bayesian filters

For something running on the exxhange server ... i dunno, there is bound to be something on sourceforge (where spambayes comes from) have a look

rom1

The server-side filter can at least discard messages which comes from hosts or networks (usually located in the far-east) known to be common sources of spam... Nobody would use these to send legitimate email anyway!

kbannon, I think you will stop bouncing spam messages the day you'll get thousands of bounces a day in your inbox because a spammer has used your email address :dunno:

See http://members.cox.net/joejob

Seth Brundle

I already do - any undeliverable emails I get are marked for deletion. Any that look like spam are marked for deletion / bounce. I worry enough without having to be concerned about other people getting the bounced mails

alleepally

I couldn't live without mailwasher. The addition of the spamcop option in the latest version (3.4) allows the email to be reported to spamcop automatically (presuming you have an account signed up with them)

I get a terrible amount of spam every day (maybe 15 to 20) and without something like mailwasher it would be impossible to manage my inbox.

maxheadroom

POPfile (http://popfile.sf.net) is what I use at home. 99.96% accurate for me at the moment. But you do need to train it first.
The only problem I hve is that sometimes it hangs and has to be restarted (it acts as a POP proxy server) - but its only at version .21 so I expect great improvements

It now has support for multiple accounts in WinXP.

toffo

If you don't want spam, use your Irish name as you address. Have my personal address in Irish for about a year and get no spam what so ever.