How do you stop spam?

If you could remake the email systems what steps would you take to prevent spam?

Banning an email address or a domain is not really a solution. The domain can be used for spam but what happens when a new owner comes in who doesn't do spam?

I got a few Blitzer emails marked automatically as spam by my email service, mainly because of the domain they use. (I hope/know Swift isn't a spamer)

I love to have a new email account, but no matter what it always seem to fill up with spam. (reminds me a little bit of a fresh install of XP that later on clogs up)

switch the computer off

death penalty for spammers.

Basically you cannot stop them. All you can do is install filters.

I reccommend having 2 addresses. One you give to people/important stuff and another you only use for submitting to forums & use on the internet.

I use mailwasher, its a good little program.

Your email service blocked COMCAST? One of the biggest ISP's in the US? Are they retarded?

As for stopping spam, there's no real way to redesign the email service which would prevent it.

You could set it up like an instant messaging client where you have to add people to a list before they can send you emails, but that would prevent anyone you don't know from contacting you.

You could charge per email. That would get rid of some of the spam, but not all of it. Mainly it would get rid of all those annoying aol chain letter emails. But then people wouldn't email eachother as often and would look for a free way to communicate, on which spam would propogate instead.

The only real way to stop it is to detect it. An ISP could look at all incoming mail and see that one sender is sending the same email to a thousand of its customers and assume that's spam. But that could also be a mailing list. So that's not a good solution. They could try detecting certain keywords, but again you might have false positives.

Really what you need is something like Hotmail has where you click a button to tell it a message is spam, and then they can remove that email from everyone else's inbox if enough people say it's spam. But even that tends to trigger on mailing lists sometimes when people are just tired of receiving it and click the spam button instead of taking the time to unsubscribe properly.

Comcast?!?! HAHAHAHAHA

Comcast gets on blacklists all the time. They get blocked a lot. I recommend getting a real email address if you have a comcast address.

If I could redesign it, I'd start by having sender authentication, each mail server (both sending and receiving) would have to verify that the sender is allowed to use the domain via a key passed in the header, the key is generated daily by the domain and the sender must authenticate in order to get it.

(or something along those lines)

A real email address? Like what? Gmail? Those get blocked a lot too for signing up to forums and things.

I suppose I could set one up on my website, but I have no idea how reliable that thing is.

You say Comcast like it's Aol or something. Comcast is a cable provider for much of the US. And as a cable provider, they have a monopoly in the areas they service. I could switch to DSL but that's much slower than cable. And sattelite has terrible pings and upload speed. So really, Comcast is it for me if I want a fast connection. At least until Verizon brings in FIOS, but I'm not so sure that's going to happen now because they just sold my phone service and everyone else in this part of the country to some other company. So I kinda suspect we're not getting high speed fiber from them anytime soon now.

Uh, email servers already prevent people who are not part of the domain from sending email. Most of them anyway. There's not too many open relays, I think they're called, anymore.

And I don't see how requiring the user to enter a catchpa every day would really prevent any spam if they only have to enter it once and they're on that domain legitimately.

Maybe if every email they had to enter a different catchpa it would do something... except for the fact that they've cracked every one out there already, so it really wouldn't.

return confirmation is quite a good one.

someone sends an email, it gets autoresponded adding a header like [not jnk 37239847] or whatever with a polite message something like:
"due to overwhelming amounts of sp&m mail, please simply reply to resend this message to prove you are a genuine sender"
that way your filters can respond to the added header and while it doesnt junk it outright can at least prioritise it above the rest. As spam is automated and unlikely to reply it would help filter out the shite. Also, as each header is unique and changeable it would at least outwit the bots.

Still a pain in he arse for everyone concerned though.

Most of my daily meal o' spam gets sorted out in Eudora automatically, matter of setting up some filters. It's a matter of tactically finding out what to scan for..

You mis-understand.

I mean:

You type your email and click send.
You are the legal owner of that domain (or a valid user)
the email program logs in to your domain using your username/password, gets the daily key, attaches it to the header, then sends it.
The receiving mail server, checks the header for a key, then goes to the domain you claim to be from and confirms that this is the key for your email address.

*EDIT*
The key being different for each email address.

Perturbatio: That's subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, brute-forcing (possibly, depends how clever the server is) and social engineering.

Also, people will set up their own mail servers and can then authenticate themselves and send as much crap as they like.

Or a turn-a-blind-eye hosting company will do it for them. Like they do all the time now anyway.

Any system designed to send and receive information will be subject to spam at some point. The only way us mortals can evade most of it is to have 2 email addresses (or many). One address to be used by people who we know (and have whitelisted) and the other for signing up to forums or otherwise is disseminated in public.

One fairly logical extension, if you own your own domain, is to use e.g. blitzforum@... to sign up to this forum, tesco@... as the address for your online shopping etc.

At least you can then track the source of whoever leaked your email address if you get spam.

Yes, but not with your domain, not unless they also hack the DNS records for your domain (in which case you've got more important things than spam to worry about).

Half the problem with spamming is that they spoof email addresses.

I regularly get spam sent to me from my own email address (A debate on the level of stupidity required for a person to open an unknown email wondering if they really did send themselves it is best left for another time), if my domain was required to check in order to allow this mail through, I would never see it.

If someone hasn't said it already.. get gmail.

http://www.gmail.com

Charge 10p to send an email.

'remaking' the email system is something that won't happen any time soon, thanks to the massive existing mail infrastructure and the unlikelyness of a global change-over to a new system.

So... we're stuck with what we have, imperfect as it might be.

Within the boundaries of the existing system, there is one thing that makes a huge difference when it comes to spam:

- Rule 1: Don't give out your email address
- Rule 2: See rule 1

It really is as simple as that. Use your 'real' email address for people you know and trust, and use an address you don't care about for all other mail services.
Possible have an in-between address for use on forums and such.

Case in point: After using it for 5 years, my private email address is still 100% spam free. I also have a hotmail address that I use when I need an address for registering on websites and such that gets a bazillion spam messages... Which I don't really care about, since I only look at it when I need something specific.

Now, if you are *already* the target of spam, there is nothing you can do to turn back the clock. All you can do is filter at that point, you're never ever going to get the junk fro flowing in.
In my experience, spambayes is the best product out there. It's free, open source, and available for pretty much any platform. On windows there's both an Outlook plugin, and a generic proxy-version which works with any email address. It's based on baysian filtering: You'll need to train it for a little, marking emails you receive as either spam or not spam. It very quickly learns your typical email patterns. The more you train it, the better it gets.
Main advantage is that it learns from YOUR email, and you don't get the cookie-cutter rules that are a lot less effective.
(Extreme example: forget about 99.9% of the spamfilter solutions out there if you happen to run a nigerian bank, or work for a company that sells viagra. spambayes would have no problem with that, since it learns what legitimate email for you looks like)

!-----"Charge 10p to send an email." ----!

Horrible idea :O

+ would be a tad unfair considering the vast majority of spam comes from botnets/abroad. All those zombie windows PCs would be costing their poor owners a fortune.

All it needs is global/universal improvements to the way mail is alowed to be sent. For example (as a start), I would prefer to see all non-authenticated SMTP/Sendmail etc universally dropped & blocked out by all ISPs and at least improved to remove the far-too-commonly used "server does not require authentication" option. That way everyone would have to have a registered username, registered email address and type a password (non saveable be best) to send mail. (Guests to that server could simply sign up online for a temp account to be able to send)

I stop spam with mailbox, new version is much better.

http://www.anti-spam-tools.com/

i i was living in America I whold have a nice machine gun.
And if i got a spam i whold go to that office that offeers service and shoot every one there.. :D

I am sure fpi go get me soon from my little chair as they inded love spamers. it makes economy work and pills and medz make police and layers have work too.

so maby spam i s good thing.. :D

Well, I just block Africa and Russia usually. Stops a lot of it.

Please do not reproduce.

Spam comes and goes for me.

Sometimes I can go a month without getting a single spam message and other months my inbox is being filled with it.

The stupid thing about Outlook Exporess for me is that it doesn't flag spam messages as spam but anything from ebay or Ebuyer, Amazon etc is flagged as spam.

I though there were already companies offering a new way of emailing but that it's just not taken off or anything. Can't find any links but I do remeber visiting a website that was selling email accounts that were guaranteed to be spam free.

Are you sure that's really Ebay?

Yep! If I make a bid and I'm highest bidder, or I get outbid on an item Ebay send me an email which outlook flags as spam.

I bought Yoshi's Island for the snes this week and when I used buyitnow to pay for it the email i got from ebay was again flagged as spam.

Uh? The version of OE I have doesnt have any spam filtering. That's all done by my ISP.

I use The one that comes with Office 2003 Pro and not the one that comes preinstalled with Windows.

Having worked for a US ISP, I can tell you that comcast gets on blocklists all the time -- it's insane how much spam originates on their network.

Really the only way to stop spam is to only give your e-mail address to people who you know aren't spammers. Posting it in any form on the internet is bound to attract spam.

Spam filters help, but they don't always solve the problem (Thunderbird filters most of my spam, but it's "adaptive" spam recognition seems a little bit "unadaptive" - the same spam often gets through. I guess a "proper" filter would help. I'm trying gmail, so I'll see how that goes.


Nowwww I know why they have gun control laws in Europe ;)

That is Outlook, not Outlook Express. Two entirely different programs, and the only thing they have in common is the similar name... entirely different code base, though.