George Fitting said:
I have been adding junk emailers to my junk email list at
a rate of 20-30 a day yet when I check the number of junk
emailers in my list I see only 110. I should have
thousands, not 110!!!
Is there some sort of limit to the number of junk
emailers I can add to my list or something???
Any advice would be greatly appreciated,
George
Since spammers use bogus e-mail addresses in the From and/or Reply-To
fields that get auto-generated every time they spew out their next issue
of spam, they get a good laugh at wishful recipients who think blocking
on their highly short-lived bogus e-mail address will actually block the
recipient from getting their spam again, as though spammers were good
people that followed Netiquette rules and were really good people. They
spam! So you're going to take their word that their e-mail address is
valid? Hi, I'm Mark, no, I'm Bob, no, I'm Mary, no, I'm Mork from Ork,
no, .... Filtering based on the sender's e-mail address only works if
they reuse that e-mail address, so you can get rid of spam from large
reputable firms or from someone stupid enough to harrass you and use
their real e-mail address (neophyte spammers learn real quick not to use
their real e-mail address when they get reported and their ISP account
gets closed). Just because Outlook provided the feature doesn't mean it
is of much value.
Hopefully the e-mail address shown in the headers of your post is not
your real e-mail address; otherwise, you've just opened yourself up to
even more spamming by address harvesters (spambots) that mine newsgroups
for e-mail addresses in the headers and in their content. When posting
to newsgroups or releasing your e-mail address in an unprotected and
untrusted environment, always munge your e-mail address, or use a
completely bogus one. Just don't end up using one that is valid or
could be valid for someone else. You can ask here about how to munge
your e-mail address, or review
http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html. If you munge your e-mail
address (rather than use a bogus one), be sure to append a signature
that tells human readers how to unmunge it back to your real e-mail
address (spambots don't understand instructions meant for humans). You
might also want to check into using e-mail aliases so you never divulge
your real e-mail address at all (lookup Sneakemail, SpamEx, SpamMotel).
The junk sender filter is probably a limited list, so you probably only
see the last N senders that you chose to block (looks like N is 110 for
you; I've never bothered using this worthless "feature" so I obviously
haven't hit any max entry limit). Your constant updating of 20 to 30
spammers per day should've been a highly clear and obvious indication
that the method you were using does not work! Check if your ISP has an
option to enable e-mail screening (to get rid of spam). Get an
anti-spam product, like SpamPal, Mailwasher, or whatever since these
will work a hell of lot better than filtering by a bogus e-mail address.
You could even go extreme with ChoiceMail, CruelMail, Vanquish, and
other challenge-response schemes.
