Defeating Spam

[Ronin Storm]

If you keep up to date with Slashdot, you've probably already seen this article on preventing spam through protecting your web pages (link to SANS). It proposes various interesting and more user-friendly methods of avoiding spam without pissing real users off.

Do you find you get a lot of spam? Why do you think you get that spam? Do CAPTCHA images work for you? Would you prefer one of the methods of preventing spam proposed in the above article?

I'm guessing that most (all?) of us hate spam so please avoid "death to spammers" posts. I'm more interested in your experiences of spam, what you think started spam arriving in your inbox, and whether current anti-spam methods employed (here or elsewhere) work for you.

 

[Devil_Incarnate]

Personally I love spam, but then again I do want to enlarge my penis, get a diploma from home, meet horny women from taiwan and buy stocks in companies I've never heard of before! I also like Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam.

 

[Nanor]

I also love spam, the other day I got an email from the former Prince of Niger. He wanted to know if I wanted to enlarge my penis. I also recieved one entitled "Did you get your jsagsdf today?". Why no, no I did not.

I hate spam, and Yahoo is crap at stopping it. I've put 500 emails on my block list. Guess what my maximum spam email adresses is at? You guessed it! 500! Yay!

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

I have several email addresses for several different things.

My Yahoo email address was removed from Yahoo! ages ago (due to 6 months inactivity), but the .net passport using the email still exists, so it's the perfect stress-free MSN Messenger email address

My old hotmail.com and G-Mail addresses were used, abused, hacked, cracked and smacked. Now they are my designated spam email addresses. Now, whenever I sign up to a forum or message board or website or anything, I use these emails to soak up the resulting wave of spam (I have thousands of 'You have subscribed to this thread!' mails from THN as well as tonnes from BioWare for registering a copy of NWN which wasn't even legitimate, and about a million from Rockstar. Thats the gmail account, the hotmail account is the one that takes all the penis enlargement, windfall, inheritance junk).

My last email address is my relatively new hotmail account which I use for work, banking, shopping etc. Havent had a one bit of spam yet.

So, for all your anti-spam needs, use junk addresses when signing up to boards! Saves you a whole mound of trouble.

 

[Nanor]

You telling us that THN is sending us spam Testuo?

 

[BiG D]

Along those lines, gmail is one of the few email services that ignores characters between a + sign and the @ symbol (which, I believe, is supposed to be the standard.) Example: emails sent to someaddress+othertext@gmail.com will be received by someaddress@gmail.com. This allows you to sign up to different sites with different variations of your address, so you can track which sites are selling your address, and then easily block those emails.

Gmail also ignores periods (but not the text after them like + does) so you can use it to the same effect.

 

[Nanor]

I'd like to bring a quote into this:

[16:33] DeZmond: Not a fan of Googlemail - or as I like to call it, 
Goggle-mail - I don't like people reading my emails before I do. :/

 

[BiG D]

That's really not accurate, for starters, but it's also terribly offtopic. Probably start another thread if you want to have that discussion...

 

[Nanor]

Actually, that is offtopic, what was I thinking?

Ontopic: Googlemail still haven't fixed this problem? It seems a bit much for google to make such a problem, them probably getting billions of hits a day.