[lug] Constant Spamming

[Samartha Deva]

True - it is a lot of effort initially to get it cleaned up.

This may not be everyone's choice to do, here is what works for me:

The problem is that email addresses are needed to stay in contact with others.

If one email address is used for many important contacts and gets polluted, 
one has to either tolerate the spam or change the email address with all 
the contacts.

Both options became unacceptable after doing this once.

Filtering did not work for me because important emails got filtered out.

My solution is to reduce the exposure of my email addresses to one contact.

I am using my own email server (postfix) and started creating receive 
addresses for every contact I exchange email as virtual (postfix) email 
address. Nobody ever gets my real email address. Only throwaway virtual 
addresses are given out.

For sending email, I use Eudora which allows me to have something like 100 
personalities which I set up with the virtual email address used as "From" 
addresses.

For example, this mailing list.

The "from" address I am sending this post to blug, it is a virtual email 
address. If it ever gets polluted again, I do the following:

a.) change the one polluted email address to something else
    - on blug
    - in my personalty in Eudora I am using for lug.

b.) bounce the old address - by forwarding it to an non-existing account

c.) also send it to another account where I can see what is still coming in.


Result:

I get virtually no spam and if I get it, I am in control, can stop it right 
away and identify the source.

Experiences:

With Ebay, I am on the third generation of email addresses. Same with a 
newsgroup I am posting. Some domain name registrar contact addresses got 
harvested also.
With blug, I am on the second generation. Another mailing list address got 
harvested too and I am getting spam but have not yet gotten around changing 
it. Actually, it is nice to get spam once and a while ;-)

What I cannot eliminate is the email address I have with my ISP and from 
there, I get a few a week which I paste into Spamcop right away.

With Yahoo, I got annoyed by the email flag getting raised on the web site.
One _has_ to have one from them when using my.yahoo. It was not possible to 
disable the email account. But they have a mailbox size limit of 6 M. Once 
can send emails of 1 M and after filling up 900 k over the limit, the email 
flag raises maybe once a month.

Samartha

Hi All!
>I'm wondering if there's a way to get rid of spammers? I'm getting spam
>more and more often. I'm running my own mail server (Sendmail 8.11.3).
>Does anybody have any ideas?
>
>Shannon