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Too Much Spam

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  • Macbook Pro
  • Spam
  • Mac OS X
  • Mac Os
Last response: in Mac Os X
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August 26, 2014 7:16:07 AM

I have Mac Os 8 on my Macbook Pro. About three months ago I started getting more spam than ever.,some of an annoying sexual matter or dating clubs.. I have added filters but as the wording is different each time,they still get through.They go to my spam box when they get through but I don't want to get them at all.
Is there an easily understandable program that will help me block these emails?I'm afraid to answer them to unsubscribe as I might get more. Why should I unsubscribe something I never requested?
I have xfinity email,Gmail and Mailplane. Even with all those filters it doesn't help.
I have Spamseive but haven't been able to figure it out.

More about : spam

August 26, 2014 7:23:38 AM

Most mail providers have built-in spam filtering. GMail's one works fine for me - picks up everything I've seen.

The best thing to do is to make sure that your email never publicly goes online.
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a b Á Mac OS
August 26, 2014 7:26:36 AM

Keep trying with SpamSieve. It is excellent and is blocking about 99% of the Spam in my mailbox.
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August 26, 2014 8:30:17 AM

dane47_02 said:
I have Mac Os 8 on my Macbook Pro. About three months ago I started getting more spam than ever.,some of an annoying sexual matter or dating clubs.. I have added filters but as the wording is different each time,they still get through.They go to my spam box when they get through but I don't want to get them at all.
Is there an easily understandable program that will help me block these emails?I'm afraid to answer them to unsubscribe as I might get more. Why should I unsubscribe something I never requested?
I have xfinity email,Gmail and Mailplane. Even with all those filters it doesn't help.
I have Spamseive but haven't been able to figure it out.


Honestly this has nothing to do with Spamfilters, Mac OS, or anything else, it is a 'change to you' that needs to be done. You have to understand, you are a profitable source of information, anyone gets anyway to add you to the MILLION email/phone/etc. list is a source of income for those people to 'get' your information. That means if you try to 'win a new car' at the mall raffle box, sign up for that "internet ad" you saw, even normal things like give BestBuy your email address to get the 'awards discounts' on your purchases, etc. This is how they 'collect' your information and then resell your info to all the junkmail, phone calls, and SPAM email you get.

You need to change your 'cyber' face, what you need to do is have multiple email accounts; one ONLY given to professional / business people / work related, one that is for FAMILY ONLY that you personally know and can immediately call them on the phone about WHY they gave your email address to 'OnlineMusic LIVE', and finally your 'disposable' one that you use for everything else. Your local grocery store NEEDS it for your 'club discount pricing'? You want to sign up for that 30 days free Internet TV service? Your doing a survey that pays you $10 but needs a valid email address? Use the 'disposable' one, which you will see get the most spam.

In my case I have owned my 'name' on the internet (Domain name) for a long time, and I use that 'name' to receive my emails, and I just assign a name to whenever I use it. For example SUBWAY got a promo of every 3rd sandwich is free once I register at their website, I would use Subway@MyDomain.com. When Walmart needs a email address for a Gift Card to be sent to my family, I use WalmartGift@MyDomain.com. You will be amazed at later on when you (like me) start to be 'spammed' from those email addresses ( Subway@MyDomain.com, WalmartGift@MyDomain.com, etc.), most of the time it is when the companies are having financial troubles and they 'sell off' the customers info to make money, or in the case of Equifax when they got hacked, they went and got everyones 'addresses' which included emails, so now I get tons of email spam sent to Equifax@MyDomain.com
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August 26, 2014 8:33:48 AM

Note: You can add what's essentially a 'comment' into an email address, which will be delivered to the same mailbox, but be treated differently in their servers.

E.g.:
myemail@gmail.com becomes myemail+somesite.com@gmail.com

Means that you can tell who's been leaking your data, and autoforward that email to trash.
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a b Á Mac OS
August 26, 2014 8:42:34 AM

I disagree that it is nothing to do with Spam filters. I have an email address on my web site - I want people to be able to contact me. It does me no good whatsoever to know who took that address and added it to a Spam list. I'm not going to inconvenience my contacts, and let the spammers win, by changing that contact address.

SpamSieve solves this. The Spam still gets sent to my account but is then deleted, so I never see it. And, once trained, it is incredibly accurate; so much so that I am comfortable with it deleting mail it identifies as Spam.

I spent two years configuring Spam filtering systems for a large multinational. I know how annoying Spam is, and how important it is for people to have pubic email addresses. I also know that, with a bit of work, it's a solvable problem.
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October 4, 2014 11:31:34 AM

If you're serious, and want the loneliest spam folders on the internet, you'll have to start over.

Read the following over a couple times and see if it makes sense:

99.99999% of the spam problem comes from "woodpeckers", spammers with automated programs who change their addresses, domains, and IP addresses so that traditional blockers and blacklists don't stop them.

The problem is not Bed, Bath, and Beyond selling our email addresses to so called partners such as Fishing Tackle, Sporting Goods, and Beyond. They obey the unsubscribe instruction.

The problem is the veritable roulette wheel of ever changing fake addresses that spammers toss out into cyberspace each day with the same old messages. Over and over again.

If we nail the woodpecker, we solve our problem.

Zero tolerance is the policy, and my spam folders are the loneliest on the internet...literally!

Here's what I've been doing after starting over with fresh accounts:

I have 4 webmail accounts whose logins are managed by the LastPass password manager. They are Outlook webmail, GMail. and 2 AOL webmail accounts.

All have scrambled usernames that are little more than extensions of the webmail password; they're for log in purposes only and are never used to send mail. Usernames like Larry007 and Mary2014 are not used. Rather, something like t9W4x?Bt@gmail.com is used to foil brute force dictionary attacks to crack the username and pair it off with all the best known webmail domains.

We send mail only from the alias email addresses we establish in Outlook webmail. Outlook's primary username is never used to send mail. And even the alias usernames are scrambled. However....it's obvious that our personal contacts are not going to like t9W4x?Bt@outlook.com, so we put our first name up front, plus one other word...and then scramble it to foil the dictionary attacker.

For example: Judy has a boyfriend named Jeff. She gives him an exclusive alias address like judyjefft9W4x?Bt@outlook.com. Should the address ever become compromised somehow, she sends him a new one to copy and paste into his Contact list, one that changes the second word and the random string, such as judyjeffreyx5t7%zJw@outlook.com. Jeff sees that jeff is now jeffrey and easily distinguishes the new from the old without having to examine the random string. He copies the new one to Contacts. Thanks to his webmail's dropdown menu, Jeff never has to actually type Judy's email address when composing a message to her.

Alias addresses give us absolute veto power over any woodpecker that might get hold of the alias address. We simply delete it and issue a new one if necessary. This veto power is post-emptive or after the fact; but it is absolute.

The GMail/AOL trinity is different. It gives us pre-emptive veto power. It works like this:

GMail has mail fetchers that fetch mail from each of 2 AOL webmail accounts. Aol has the only blocker on the internet that is worth using. The Exclusive Blocker. The AOL accounts are used for initial registrations only. We don't send mail from them.

The Exclusive Blocker does not look for an address to reject; it looks for an address to accept. It accepts mail only from the AOL Contacts list. Another setting below the Blocker setting allows the choice of sending the blocked mail to the spam folder or blocking it at the server. This latter option keeps it out of AOL's spam folder, as well as out of AOL's inbox.

However, the Exclusive Blocker has one weakness. Spoofing.

If a spammer can guess any of our contacts and pretend to be that contact in the "From" field of his message, he will land right in our inbox. And all he has to assume is that the user pays his bills online. He then programs all of the billing addresses of every credit card company, every bank, every auto insurance company, every phone and utility company, into his automated spam program and pairs it off with AOL.com, and he's in.

We can stop him by setting up the second AOL webmail and populating it only with trusted, but spoofable, contacts, such as our banks and the others mentioned above. We keep them separate from the AOL 1 webmail where there may be some possibility of someone there selling our scrambled AOL 1 email address. The AOL 2 contacts won't do that.

Now we set up mail 2 fetchers in GMail to fetch mail from the 2 AOL webmail accounts. With these fetchers we can direct the AOL 1 mail to the inbox folder and the AOL 2 monthly bills to a GMail folder we've created, such as "bills" or A-Monthly. Or we can fetch it all to GMail's inbox.

Note that the 2 AOL webmail accounts are little more filter/blockers. We spend most of our non-social time in GMail, whose scrambled username, once again, is never used to send mail.

To see how it works, imagine a hypothetical user who plays the horses. He subscribes to various advisory newsletters who give him recommendations of horses to bet on at various tracks around the country. These newsletters cover a wide range of ethics, some respecting the user's privacy, some not.

He has 20 newsletters in AOL 1. One of them, abchotponies@yahoo.com sells his address to xyzevenhotterponies@yahoo.com. XYZ is a woodpecker. He has a roulette wheel of changing return addresses. He is also a spoofer. He has another roulette wheel of spoofed banks, auto insurance companies, etc.

He launches the first wheel and AOL 1's Exclusive Blocker scrutinizes the spammer's "address of the day" and finds no address in AOL 1 Contacts to match it. Next day, different fake address from the wheel, same result. The XYZ spammer is left in cyberspace.

Then he launches the second wheel with the banks, etc., and AOL 1's blocker again finds no address in AOL 1 Contacts to match the address submitted by the wheel that day. Or the next day. Or the next. Again the spammer is left in cyberspace.

Why? Because the banks, etc are in AOL 2. XYZ needs 3 things to barge into this user's webmail. He needs the username, a user Contact address, and a webmail common to both. He has AOL 1's username, AOL 2's Contact(s), but no common webmail. He can't get in. Unless he spoofs abchotponies, the one who sold him the AOL 1 username and address in the first place. He won't.

So....to summarize: the GMail AOL trinity is used for non-social daily and periodic business and gives us absolute, pre-emptive veto power over woodpecker spammers by way of scrambled usernames, AOL's Exclusive Blocker, and the bulletproofing of that blocker by separating ethics-challenged Contacts in AOL 1 from trustworthy, but spoofable, Contacts in AOL 2. The mail is gathered in one place by the 2 GMail fetchers.

Outlook aliases are used to send mail and they allow for receiving mail from people we don't know; old classmates trying to find us on facebook where we've posted an alias that can be deleted if necessary. All social mail, commerce, and anything potentially fishy is handled with aliases; indeed, all sending of any mail is from aliases. (Alias mail can also be fetched to GMail).



The trinity of Gmail and the two AOL accounts keeps us from spending too much time deleting and creating alias addresses in Outlook. Our regular non-social business is covered by the Exclusive Blocker. Our newer business and social business is covered by the aliases.

I'm going on 3 years now using this system. The difference is night and day! No aggravation, none of the stress that comes when someone has control over you. This approach doesn't "fight" spam, or "reduce" it. It keeps us under the radar, where the woodpecker spammer can't find us....and eliminates it!

Read this over a couple of times and adapt it to your situation. You may even be able to simplify it.

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