Spam & Junk Email

Anybody who uses the internet is aware of the alarming increase in spam being generated worldwide, in fact estimates are that around 95% of all email now circulating in the world is spam email and it is predicted to increase even further before much longer, placing extremely heavy loads on already overworked mailservers.

While most ISP's have some sort of spam filtering in place, there is a limit to what these can achieve as spammers are employing increasingly sophisticated means of accomplishing their task.

"80% of spam received by Internet users ... can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations ("spam gangs"), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. These spam operations consist of an estimated 500-600 professional spammers with ever-changing aliases and domains. The vast majority of those listed here operate illegally and move from network to network (and country to country) seeking out "spam-friendly" Internet Service Providers ("ISPs") known for lax enforcing of anti-spam policies"
Quoted from http://www.spamhaus.org/

From their list of most wanted spammers here: http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso you will start to get an idea of the type of people who are involved in spamming.

Spammers now have software that can send hundreds of thousands - even millions - of email messages at the click of a mouse. The addresses can be genuine (harvested from virus infected computers & other sources) or just as often they are generated completely at random, by adding all possible combinations of letters and numbers to a domain name, e.g. anybody@anydomain.com, etc. That is why changing your email address will only ever be a temporary solution.

Another source of spam is that sent by zombie computers.

It is estimated there are several million zombie computers operating worldwide and if you continue to access the internet with an trojan or worm infected computer, your computer could be one of them. Symptoms of a infected computer that is being used as a zombie, can include a suddenly sluggish broadband connection, excessive hard drive activity, an unresponsive mouse or keyboard, or bounce notifications in your inbox from people you never tried to contact. BUT PLEASE NOTE having any or all of these symptoms does not necessarily mean your computer is infected.

Microsoft reported that in less than three weeks their lab’s zombie computer received more than 5 million requests to send 18 million spam e-mails. These requests contained advertisements for more than 13,000 unique domains. On a regular computer, these spam mails would have ended up in e-mail inboxes or, if nabbed by a spam filter, in junk e-mail folders. But Microsoft’s researchers quarantined the zombie machine, preventing it from sending any spam onto the public Internet.

Computer criminals can also use zombie computers to launch phishing attacks that try to steal personal information such as bank account details and credit-card numbers.

Some things to keep in mind:

• There is no magic bullet. Spam is a moving target and as yet, there is no solution that completely eliminates it.
• There is no best solution, but there is most likely a best solution for you. When choosing an anti-spam tool, work out what matters to you (ease of use, fine control, absolutely no false positives, advanced options) and look for those things.
• Find a solution which gives you relief. Even the best anti-spam product won't entirely eliminate the need to deal with spam, but it should make dealing with spam no more than a tolerable nuisance. The aim is to reclaim your email, making it, once more, feel like a good and useful thing in your life, instead of a burden.

In my opinion you can't go past Mailwasher Free or MailWasher Pro. Both have an intuitive user interface and shortest learning curve of any program I have trialled. But most importantly, your email is dealt with on the server before being downloaded to your computer. This has the two-fold benefit of saving download time of unwanted junk mail and practically negating the possibility of downloading a virus infected email.

Even the most sophisticated programs available require "training" as there is a limit to just how intuitive a program can be about determining what is and is not spam, without some help from a human, don't think you can just install a program and expect the junkmail to miraculously cease.

PLEASE NOTE - I DO NOT OFFER FREE SUPPORT for these programs

I have no affiliation with the program maker and cannot vouch for or guarantee the results you may experience. Iif you choose to use them you do so at your own risk.