My e-mail is flooded each day with 100 messages about viagra sale or
increasing my penis which take too much time to look at to see if any
e-mail is useful before deleting all the spam. My internet provider,
Baltimore County Public Library (bcpl.net) has no advice . Going to
another provider would necessitate notifying all my correspondents
about my e-mail change. Does anybody know of a good spam filtering
software that will filter out unwanted messages such as the above but
keep in messages about prostate cancer, or dropped uterus, which are
also sex oriented but which, because of my and my wife's condition
would like to keep?
Earthlink, I was told, has a program which will filter out any message
from anybody who is not on a list that I approve, but will ask me for
approval of other senders. How good is such a program? Is there
something similar in software that can be used with my present e-mail
with bcpl.net?

Hell vaac. I suggest switching email programs.

I have used a number of different email clients and by far the best
one so far is Mozilla Mail for a number of reason. The main one being
that it has incredible spam blocking software. When I log in in the
morning, it will download 70+ messages, filter out perhaps 65 of them
and leave me with my real 5 messages worth of mail. Sometimes it will
miss a junk mail and it will get through, but you mark that message as
junk mail and the spam filter learns what you think is junk and gets
better and better over time. I would say it is about 95%+ accuracy
rate for me after using it for a while. It is also a really good and
easy to use email program.

Usually once a day I will take a quick peruse through the junk
messages to make sure I did not miss anything. This is very rare.

The best part is the program is free! It is part of the larger Mozilla
suite of programs which includes an incredible browser that replaced
Internet Explorer for me. The suite is available at
http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/.

If you don't want to check out the Mozilla web browser and just want
just an email client, you can get a stand alone program called 
Thunderbird here: http://downloads.us-east3.mozdev.org/seb/thunderbird/MozillaThunderbird-0.4-setup.exe
This is very similar to Mozilla Mail and it has the same excellent
spam filtering program built into it.

Good luck in your fight against spam!
-shiva777

---

Request for Answer Clarification by vaac-ga on 28 Jan 2004 19:44 PST

To probonopublico-ga:  HWhat does it mean to killed the email
address that had been attracting all the attention and how is this done?

---

Clarification of Answer by shiva777-ga on 29 Jan 2004 15:35 PST

Hello. Thanks for the tip! Since your clarification request was
directed at probonopublic I will leave it to him. Another piece of
advice I have is to get a hotmail or yahoo account and use that
account only when you need to leave your email address to sign up for
something or get a password or whatever. That way your regular email
address is kept private and you can still sign up for things. Good
luck! -shiva777

Good answer and good commemts

I was having precisely the same problem until I killed off the email
address that had been attracting all the attention.

Now, almost NOTHING!

Back when I started dealing with my own incoming spam, the Mozilla
mailer wasn't available yet or I didn't know about it, so I did it the
hard way.  By now I've accumulated a pretty useful list of keywords
and variants (via gra, v1@gr@, v-i-a-g-r-a, etc.) to filter on, and,
even more helpful, sender lines--especially Internet country codes,
which I found here:

http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/85tldn.htm

If you filter out all the messages that include .hk and .ng and so on,
you will eliminate a huge amount of the sheer junk (including most of
the stuff that's illegible in English anyway--so you couldn't respond
if you wanted to).

When I'm ready to learn a new mailer, I'll probably try Mozilla, but
for now this has saved me from having to change my service or drop an
e-mail address.

Apteryx

Hi Apteryx

Interesting comment.

It's amazing the lengths that the spammers go to (by corrupting
spellings, etc.) to try to beat the filters.

I tried relying on filters before hitting the nuclear button.

Now, I am very careful about where I leave my email address.

Hi, Bryan--

But--some spam earns its keep!  I have been getting spam for a while
that all has the number 1251 mixed in with illegible stuff on the
subject line--and the most deliriously funny "sender" names generated
automatically by some kind of algorithm.  Just look at this sampling
from the great collection I've made:

Overpowering D. Devouter
Clapboarding E. Snuffed
Smokehouse H. Deceiving
Naipaul F. Radiator
Monsters B. Refill
Symptom M. Prognosticated
Diddling T. Injected
Storminess I. Notarized

I swear I have received e-mail "from" all of these (and many more,
some truly spectacular).  I couldn't possibly have made them up
myself!

It's the middle initials that make these such a scream.  They signify
that the sender line is meant to be read as a Western-style name and
not just a random word pair.  I've made a special folder for these so
I don't miss any, and I filter them *in*.  If I go a day without
hearing from one of the 1251 guys, I'm disappointed.

Apteryx

Hi, Again, Apteryx

A brilliant collection and truly hilarious.

I wonder how these guys require payment for their offerings?

Maybe it's just Credit Card Numbers that they're after?

Regards

Bryan

I suggest you to try with one of these programs:
MAilWasher Pro (The one that I use), it is not free, Mailwasher free
is limited to one e-mail account and does not include Hotmail support;
MailWasher Pro supports multiple accounts and Hotmail:
-Free version download:
http://www.mailwasher.net/download.php
-Pro version download:
http://www.firetrust.com/download/mailwasherpro/?PHPSESSID=8987f9b7c0381f018c4dcf5b1ae00f4d
-MailWasher Overview:
http://www.mailwasher.net/tutorial.php

----------------------------------------------------
Another good option is K9, this small free program (110kb) is called
to be the standard in antispam software:
http://keir.net/k9.html
http://keir.net/download/k9v1setup.exe


Hope this helps you.

I should never have posted my Comment because TODAY I've had 5 similar
spam messages, all attaching the same Zip file.

I'm sure that they contain a virus so I have quarantined them all.

I guess that one of my correspondents is infected ... But who?

If you use email client Outlook 2000/2002/2003 or Outlook Express
5/5.5/6, then I can suggest you to use bayesian spam filters that are
incorporate into Outlook or Outlook Express. I use Spam Bully from
http://ww.spambully.com .
you can try it, it's very efficient, it kill more than 99% after I
learned from my personal messages.