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How you deal with spams
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How you deal with spams

Hello All,

from time to time some spammers will send you daily if not every few hours advertising emails.

what you do usually to stop them?

myself i check if they have unsubscribe link and follow that link to unsubscribe but some of the spammers they send you to google search or other links.

so if for 2nd time i receive email from the same spammer i check the IP and host then I setup a forwarding rule to his host provider domain registery and IP owner they will stop immediately.

tell us your experience how you deal with them?

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Comments

  • I just mark the email as spam and move on with my day.

    I'm a bit hesitant to hit the unsubscribe button on some of the messages (depending on the sender) because if they're illegally spamming then they just confirmed that I'm receiving my messages and can spam me further.

  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    For spammers, going to the unsubscribe link does the opposite, it just confirms that it is a valid live email address. You'll get more spam this way.
    I use spamassassin on the server level and I use filters in thunderbird or evolution (I use evolution more). When I have time, I report the spam email to spamcop.

  • Until recently, I used spamassassin on server level which worked amazingly well. Not flawless, but close enough. Did not miss much and very rarely had any false positives. Had a few scripts that analyzed the spam and allowed me to report the worst offenders to spamcop.

    Lately, I've been moving all my email to Google. I just don't find it worth the time and energy to manage my own email when someone else can do it much more efficiently for literally a few dollars every month. Delivery is excellent and the antispam is really really good.

    Thanked by 2Arkas mad_4u
  • emghemgh Member
    edited October 2022

    I read it as ”how to deal with spasm”.

    I would not have clicked if I read it right.

    Thanked by 1lovelyserver
  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    @emgh said: I would not have clicked if I read it right.

    The old dyslexia acting up? It happens to me all the time :wink:

    Thanked by 1emgh
  • I Mail them back and ask then polite to stop

  • @Arkas said:

    @emgh said: I would not have clicked if I read it right.

    The old dyslexia acting up? It happens to me all the time :wink:

    Nah, ADHD and thinking I’ll just have to read half go get it. :)

    80 % of the time that’s the case, so the ADHD-brain gets used to it, and basically trains itself to focus even less than it’s actually capable of.

    Thanked by 1Arkas
  • defaultdefault Veteran
    edited October 2022

    @rcy026 said:
    Lately, I've been moving all my email to Google. I just don't find it worth the time and energy to manage my own email when someone else can do it much more efficiently for literally a few dollars every month. Delivery is excellent and the antispam is really really good.

    This is exactly why EU is suffering. We did not have the time and energy to create our own sources of energy, and now we are in a crisis blaming someone else, a single scapegoat (Putin - but I have no intention to derail the topic).

    For the love of technology, freedom, and privacy, please host the things yourself and get your hands dirty. Nowadays we even have automated scripts to help us out in creating a small email server. Don't rely on someone else, to blame someone else for your problems.

    Thanked by 2Arkas AndrewL64
  • I scam the spammers.

    Thanked by 1AndrewL64
  • @default said:

    @rcy026 said:
    Lately, I've been moving all my email to Google. I just don't find it worth the time and energy to manage my own email when someone else can do it much more efficiently for literally a few dollars every month. Delivery is excellent and the antispam is really really good.

    This is exactly why EU is suffering. We did not have the time and energy to create our own sources of energy, and now we are in a crisis blaming someone else, a single scapegoat (Putin - but I have no intention to derail the topic).

    Well actually, no. That is why Germany and other countries relying on Russian gas is suffering. I'm Swedish, we hardly use gas at all, we are suffering because of stupid politicians. We have our own energy sources, we just don't use them correctly.

    For the love of technology, freedom, and privacy, please host the things yourself and get your hands dirty. Nowadays we even have automated scripts to help us out in creating a small email server. Don't rely on someone else, to blame someone else for your problems.

    I've been running mail servers for 30 years, I ran an ISP in the 90's before it was cool, I have contributed to both qmail and postfix as well as courier and UW. I promise you I do not need automated scripts to create a mail server.
    Just because I know how to do something, does not mean it's a good idea to do it.
    And when have I ever blamed someone else for my problems?

  • defaultdefault Veteran
    edited October 2022

    @rcy026 - you get my point. It's the principle of the thing. I am not blaming you of anything. But it would be unfair to blame Google later if they become too greedy and impose weird rules on email using spam as reason, when we actually hand them over the monopoly of such market.

    This is why I offered as an example the energy crisis. Things went south with politics and economic relationships, and now we blame the provider of energy (Russia in this case), when we could have build our own infrastructure when we had the money and time.

    This is why I love to host my own stuff as much as possible. It's better when you are in control, and don't let corporations or giants have the monopoly. Again: it's the principle of the thing, and this is why I am on LET, precisely for low-end and self-hosted solutions.

    Just like you can do stuff and have experience, just like that EU has the brains and experience, but it was easier to just hand the profits to someone else. I hope you understand my comparison. I am not blaming you of anything, but I just can't look away when I see smart people handing their privacy to greedy corporations.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    Outsource it to @jar
    Just move email to spam, easy.

  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    @Neoon said: Outsource it to @jar

    Yes, I do that, but it doesn't always stop spam. It always needs human intervention, you need to know or learn what you're doing.

  • hostikohostiko Member, Host Rep

    It might be a good idea to provide unique email per service, so if it got leaked to spam databases, you could reject all emails coming to that address. To do that you can use services like anonaddy.com, simplelogin.io or even self host.

    Thanked by 1emg
  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    Spam?
    I slice them and eat with rice.

    Thanked by 2ehab BingoBongo
  • @default said:
    @rcy026 - you get my point. It's the principle of the thing. I am not blaming you of anything. But it would be unfair to blame Google later if they become too greedy and impose weird rules on email using spam as reason, when we actually hand them over the monopoly of such market.

    This is why I offered as an example the energy crisis. Things went south with politics and economic relationships, and now we blame the provider of energy (Russia in this case), when we could have build our own infrastructure when we had the money and time.

    This is why I love to host my own stuff as much as possible. It's better when you are in control, and don't let corporations or giants have the monopoly. Again: it's the principle of the thing, and this is why I am on LET, precisely for low-end and self-hosted solutions.

    Just like you can do stuff and have experience, just like that EU has the brains and experience, but it was easier to just hand the profits to someone else. I hope you understand my comparison. I am not blaming you of anything, but I just can't look away when I see smart people handing their privacy to greedy corporations.

    I get where you are coming from, I simply do not agree.
    I guess where we differ is who we blame. I do not blame Russia for the energy crisis, a lot of people have been trying to point out the problem with energy for 20 years, long before Russia cut the gas flow. The fact that people did not listen is not Russia's fault.
    But enough about Russia.

    As stated, I have been involved with email basically my entire life, and if someone asks me for the best way to handle email I will give my honest opinion. Today, I would say Google offers a very hard to beat option for a lot of people. If they later on decide to "impose weird rules" I will re-evaluate that opinion, but as of today, I will stand by it.
    Don't get me wrong, I still run a whole bunch of self-hosted mailservers, but I still would not say that it is the best solution for every user.

    PS. I should point out that I in no way support Russia or what they are doing, I just do not blame them for an energy crisis that we have built our self.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    @Arkas said:

    @Neoon said: Outsource it to @jar

    Yes, I do that, but it doesn't always stop spam. It always needs human intervention, you need to know or learn what you're doing.

    Yes, hence I send @jar a PM for every spam email I get.
    Since then, didn't got any more spam at all.

  • I mark the emails as spam. It does a great job.

    Also, for some websites, which I considered trusthy, I unsubscribed. It wasn't spam, but unwanted marketing emails. So I've got rid of some emails. But this action must be taken carefully because can be risky (we can go into some marketing lists, as it was pointed previously).

    Thanked by 1ehab
  • @rcy026 said:

    @default said:

    @rcy026 said:
    Lately, I've been moving all my email to Google. I just don't find it worth the time and energy to manage my own email when someone else can do it much more efficiently for literally a few dollars every month. Delivery is excellent and the antispam is really really good.

    This is exactly why EU is suffering. We did not have the time and energy to create our own sources of energy, and now we are in a crisis blaming someone else, a single scapegoat (Putin - but I have no intention to derail the topic).

    Well actually, no. That is why Germany and other countries relying on Russian gas is suffering. I'm Swedish, we hardly use gas at all, we are suffering because of stupid politicians. We have our own energy sources, we just don't use them correctly.

    For the love of technology, freedom, and privacy, please host the things yourself and get your hands dirty. Nowadays we even have automated scripts to help us out in creating a small email server. Don't rely on someone else, to blame someone else for your problems.

    I've been running mail servers for 30 years, I ran an ISP in the 90's before it was cool, I have contributed to both qmail and postfix as well as courier and UW. I promise you I do not need automated scripts to create a mail server.
    Just because I know how to do something, does not mean it's a good idea to do it.
    And when have I ever blamed someone else for my problems?

    Not that’s it the point of this thread, but we (Sweden) actually do not have enough energy.

    First of all, even though we, on a 1-year-average produce more than we consume, we don’t always.

    See https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/energi/tillforsel-och-anvandning-av-energi/manatlig-elstatistik-och-byten-av-elleverantor/pong/tabell-och-diagram/import-och-export-av-el-manadsvis/.

    Roughly speaking, we export a lot to Finland & Dennark, and import a lot from Norway.

    Yes, we would have been self-sufficient when looking at s whole year, but not when looking at day to day.

    Skåne (south of Sweden, using much more energy than it produces) would be without energy a lot of the time.

    Also, we fix this overproduction in the north (due to better geograpical qualities) and underproduction in the south by importing and exporting power (it’s better to let Norway or Finland have our energy in the north, and to import energy to our south, then to let Skåne die once in a while).

    Yes, our huge export compared to import has been damaging, and at many points very so.

    However, what’s the alternative? If we were to be able to exit the EU energy market, and that’s a BIG IF, if we still want to be in the union, I’m sure Norway wouldn’t wanna supply us with energy when really needed - since we’d bail on Denmark & Finland.

    What’s needed is incentives to build energy producing facitiles of any kind, and security.

    Give companies a garantuee that we’ll buy their electricity for a minimum price, and give them legal garantuee that taxes won’t be highered in order to fuck up their estimations.

    We did this essentially by forcing nuclear power plats to shut down, because of the green movement, effecively fucking us and countries importing from us.

    I’m sure that sitting down with our energy companies and really asking, what’s needed from the govt to speed up LONG-TERM building of this capacity, energy prices won’t be this high forever, and nuclear can take 10 years to build, we need to create a stable environment.

    Fun-fact: Vattenfall wanted this. Our green movement strongly didn’t, and replaced Vattenfalls CEO with a new CEO always going on about how nuclear isn’t fincanically fitting.

    And now the green-movement can refer to the CEO that they put there, to argue that building them dosen’t make sense.

  • emgemg Veteran

    @hostiko said:
    It might be a good idea to provide unique email per service, so if it got leaked to spam databases, you could reject all emails coming to that address. To do that you can use services like anonaddy.com, simplelogin.io or even self host.

    I do the same, but with my own domains. I create a unique email address for each website, service, etc. Most of them are not actual email accounts but forwarders (aliases).

    It is interesting to learn who sold your email address to whom ... or who stole it from their former employer.

    You will also know when someone's customer database or personal computer has been hacked or infected. You would be amazed to learn which companies have lost control of their customer data. Sad to say, but some of them are in the security business.

    A common scenario is you buy a product from someone, and suddenly that email address starts to get "viagra" and fake "we hacked your account" ransom demands. I leave the forwarder active after an order. It can take 10 years or more before the spam suddenly starts. Yeah, sometimes I look at the spam destination email address and say to myself, "Who did I create this email address for?" Ouch!

    By the way, not all companies respond well when you inform them that their customer database was hacked, despite having obvious proof in your hands. They all seem to go through the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) before finally doing something about it. Some of them never get past "denial" and will not engage despite the breach disclosure laws in their state or country. No surprise there. (To be clear, I notify and answer questions, that's all.)

    I turn all spam filters off. I want all the email. Let me and my email client decide. The possible spam goes to a junk folder for a quick review. Most are deleted immediately without reading. I don't get that much.

    I would not click an unsubscribe link from obvious spam, but most of the unwanted email comes from merchants who got my email address when I ordered one item from them. Of course, the email address is unique for their use. If they are legitimate, I click Unsubscribe. If that fails and I get a second email from them, I delete the forwarder, which ends the problem permanently.

    Even when someone honors an unsubscribe request, they may reactivate it in the future. Some desperate asshole in marketing finds a flimsy justification to ignore that pool of unsubscribed email addresses and spams them anyway. Delete the forwarder, done.

    WARNING!! RISKS!!

    If your email hosting provider account with all those forwarders gets hacked, the attackers get a LOT of email addresses to spam all at once and they all forward to the same email account. It has not happened to me (yet, eek!), but it is a genuine concern.

    Hints

    • Learn how to send email "from" forwarder email addresses using spoofing. I do not bother with this any longer. There are too many issues with email delivery. I just set the "Reply To" address and use a temporary email account to send the message. Every once in a while, I delete the old "sender" account and create a new one.
    • Learn how to create email forwarders quickly, on the fly. I can be on the phone with someone and can create an email address instantly to give them.
    • Think about the forwarders you create.
      • If you deal with a company often, you may want to give out "special use" email addresses rather than a main one. Example: If I deal with Microsoft often, I might have a "[email protected]" email address, but for a special problem, I may create a separate email address "[email protected]" for that special one-time need.
      • If you attend a conference or trade show every year, you may want to create a separate forwarder for each event. Create email addresses like "[email protected]", "[email protected]", etc. so you can drop the spam that comes from a company whose booth you saw back in 2015 and no longer have any interest.
    • If you decide to do what I do, I recommend that you point your forwarders to one "aggregate forwarder" email address. Make the "aggregate forwarder" point to your email account. This way, your primary email account can change without affecting that large number of forwarding email addresses. All you have to do is point the "aggregate forwarder" to the new email address. (This capability was very useful in the days before free email accounts like Yahoo and Gmail, where everyone used the email address from their ISP. When they moved, they lost their email address because of a new ISP.)
    • Backup your email accounts and forwarders. Isn't that obvious?
    Thanked by 3Arkas iqbal yoursunny
  • I ended up send any non-whitelist domain mail to spam, and do whitelist If someone mention me send the mail to me.

  • I run spamassassin on my incoming mail, but haven't yet found a good solution for getting spam I've marked back in my mail client back into spamassassin so it can learn from it.

  • @default said:
    This is exactly why EU is suffering. We did not have the time and energy to create our own sources of energy, and now we are in a crisis blaming someone else, a single scapegoat (Putin - but I have no intention to derail the topic).

    For the love of technology, freedom, and privacy, please host the things yourself and get your hands dirty. Nowadays we even have automated scripts to help us out in creating a small email server. Don't rely on someone else, to blame someone else for your problems.

    This is also why email clients have stagnated for over a decade. People have resigned to using gmail as a webclient that no one even bothers to develop a good email client anymore. Indirectly, it caused Outlook to remain "the" email client in the enterprise space.

    Thanked by 2default emg
  • emgemg Veteran
    edited October 2022

    An OFF TOPIC addendum related to my long post above.

    To all the people here who run your own businesses or work for a company:

    -> PLEASE post a method to report a security incident somewhere on your website. Periodically check it to make sure it is working.

    PRETTY PLEASE!!

    All too often, a company makes it nearly impossible to inform them that their systems, networks, customer databases, etc. have been hacked.

    Thanked by 1yoursunny
  • @mosquitoguy said:

    This is also why email clients have stagnated for over a decade. People have resigned to using gmail as a webclient that no one even bothers to develop a good email client anymore. Indirectly, it caused Outlook to remain "the" email client in the enterprise space.

    And for 99% of users that is good enough, not the say more then they will ever need.

    We have to keep in mind that users like us that understands technology and like to tinker with servers are a tiny minority. For most people email is what pops up as a notification in the phone or on their desktop. They know how to write an email and they know how to reply but that's it, all the other buttons are like black magic to them. Ask them what email client they use, and the vast majority will not be able to tell you.

    I agree that development of email clients have totally stagnated, but for a simple reason. There is no demand for it. The vast majority of users are totally satisfied with Outlook or Gmail, and the tiny minority that is not are an extremely picky bunch that is almost impossible to please. No software developer with an ounce of sanity would even attempt it.

    I've been working with email my entire life and I can honestly say that I miss the days when every company had their own mailserver and mailclients like Eudora, Pegasus and The Bat were installed on every workstation. But things change and today that would be a total nightmare and probably render email more or less useless.

    Thanked by 1default
  • BlaZeBlaZe Member, Host Rep

    I let @jar handle my spam.

    Peace of mind.

  • defaultdefault Veteran
    edited October 2022

    @rcy026 said:
    But things change and today that would be a total nightmare and probably render email more or less useless.

    Giving all our email to few corporations is the worst thing. We will lose all email messaging in bureaucracy and rules imposed by corporations. No more freedom; no more privacy.

    We forgot to keep the data for ourselves, and now give it away to corporations investing in artificial intelligence, just for our comfort and plausible laziness; and then we wonder why we get targeted advertising.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited October 2022

    @ralf said:
    I run spamassassin on my incoming mail, but haven't yet found a good solution for getting spam I've marked back in my mail client back into spamassassin so it can learn from it.

    Save yourself a lot of time and don't. My experience with SA bayesian learning has been this:

    After roughly 3 years of training it, the data becomes so muddy that it starts targeting ham as spam, and the resolution is to throw out the whole data at once and call it a lost cause.

    That's the risk of continually feeding machine learning with an endless barrage of random data as I see it. It works best on consistent data formats, but spam body is as inconsistent as can be. Google has obviously done a great job of balancing it but I'm not convinced the rest of us have.

    Thanked by 2ralf emg
  • I definitely need to train it to reject Louis Vuitton bags though as that represents about 80% of the spam I get! :D

    Thanked by 1jar
  • LittleCreekLittleCreek Member, Patron Provider

    I take 60 seconds out of my day and simply delete it. I don't know why people are so obsessed with how to deal with spam.

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