Fighting new Junkmail tactics?

karavite

karavite

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I'm certianly not blaming Apple, but I have noticed my poor Mail junkmail filter is not quite keeping up with the latest spam. I'm constantly turning "training" back on and that seems to help, but the latest fads in junkmail are hard to keep up with. For example junk mail messages with subjects like: 'Re: customer service password activation' or just "Hello" that I have marked "is junkmail" seem to have caused Mail to mark a few non junk messages as junk - For example, one from a site with forums for my car motifying me about my password and one from a friend saying "Hello." Beyond deceiving subject titles, I think these scum bags are purposely trying to decieve various junkmail filters - not just Apple's too of course.

So, I have two questions.

1. Is there a superioir junk mail filter that I can use with Mail? Because it seems pretty darn good. What bothers me is the increasing amount of "false negatives" - junk that is not junk causing me to go through my junk folder every day! Kind of defeats the purpose. :)

2. Lately I seem to get junk mail related to my surfing and I'm not surfing porn! For example, I was looking for houses and started getting real estate junk mail. I was surfing for home audio stuff and started getting audio junk, but I swear I never filled a survey or anything. I never reply with an "unsubscribe." either. Is it possible for these sites to get my email address from my browser/cookies (mainly IE) or are they just lucky? If they can get it from my browser, how do I stop that!

I wonder how much of our precious bandwidth is wasted on junkmail? I get about 15 junk emails a day.
 
I was thinking to implement Spamassassin filtering to mail.app - but Jaguar's mail.app does not support Unix mail axxounts thus I can't. (I hope 10.3 will)

I use only personalized filters, and they work very well. Less than 10 spams enter to inbox weekly. (with about 50 filters)

Some suggestion for filters;

- If your email is not to TO: field > trash
-If mail contains one of 'Click here' 'unsub' 'opt-out' 'this is not spam' 'unsolicited' 'this email was never sent unsolicited' (compile as needed) > trash
-If msg contains one of 'mp3' 'webcam' 'sex' 'sesso' 'porn' 'slut' (etc compile XX terms as needed) > trash
-iIf sender contains hotmail, tripod or lycos > trash (sorry for hotmail users. I check the trash daily, but 99% of mails coming from those are trash)
-The filters that work correctly e.g. for a month I add also a 'forward to (my spamcop account)
-If sender contains 'spamcop' > trash (as it's only the reply of it)

And then check the trash about once a day before emptying just to see if something that wasn't spam was cought in my filters.

- Don't use the precompiled fields in your browsers = don't show an email address of yours in any of the precompiled things in browser.
 
The valiant fight against spam!

(belongs in he Net: Applications & Connections)


Regards,

Doug
 
I'd like all web e-mail (I mean pages that render like HTML) except the ones with "Apple" in the title to be trashed.

Most spam is, actually, built in HTML and not in text or rich text.
 
I think the only difference between training mode and Automatic is Mail's handling of the messages. If you're vigilant about telling Mail that a particular message is Junk (and what's Not Junk), it will take that into account with future messages. I only have 1 or 2 custom filters besides the "Junk" filter, and I only see about 5-10 in my inbox each week. According to the growth of my Junk folder, I'm seeing around 200 spams/week come through my account.

I haven't seen a real problem with false positives (mail gets marked as Junk when it's not) - only 2 have got past in all the time I've been running Jag (I stood in line @ the Apple store the night it was released). One of those was a friend of mine with a .co.uk address, and the content of the message was very short, with a single http link in it. The other was from another friend's hotmail address. In both cases, I told Mail that the message was Not Junk, and added them to the address-book. That prevented them getting sent to Junk after that.

A Plan for Spam goes into detail about how Bayesian filtering works, and talks about why it's so darned hard to effectively filter 100% of spam, and nothing else. He also talks about the false-positive vs false-negative (a mail is not marked as spam even though it is), and reckons that the filtering should be intentionally tuned to be a bit conservative about this. Definitely an interesting read.
 
I've noticed my junk mail filter is getting really bad lately. Every day now I'm getting to many junk mails getting though. I always highlight and mark as junk mail but more and more are getting though every day. And I'm not sighing up for anything! I'll try some new custom filters. That sounds good.
 
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