Email problem

[Skinner]

I had kept my email address COMPLETELY spam free since I switched ISPs about 18 months ago, then I bought something on ebay for the first time ever and didn't know that it's a good idea to use a separate email account for ebay.

Well, not a day after the transaction spam started flooding in. I have got some of it under control but I keep receiving these returned mail emails (or reciepts, whatever you call them) that say I've sent email to an undeliverable location. It appears that I am sending these emails. I don't see anything in my sent box that refers to them. i can't figure out what's going on. I've ran Ad-aware, spybot, AVG but my system appears clean. I used some anti-spam programs but they seemed to suck. I bought the item from ebay months ago and I've been getting 15 returned email reciepts a day.

Anybody have any idea what the hell is going on? I like my email address and don't want to lose it.

[markv]

If you're getting return receipts it means some spammer is using your email address as a return address. Not much you can do about it except get a new email account. Usually they do this for a week or so and then move on. It happened to me not too long ago, such is life!

[Squirrel Killer]

Another possibility is that the eBay seller is infected with one of those Outlook worms that searches the infected person's email account for addresses. My last boss got infected with one of these, and I started getting the same thing (bounces to message I never sent) shortly afterwards.

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah, I'm not sure they are actually bounces, just worms disguised as a return mail. I've actually had a similar problem with a sharp increase in spam. Mine occured when I switched servers for my domain (thewidgets.com). I don't know if my old host just had really great spam/virus filtering on the server side I didn't know about, or if my new host, POE Hosting is just a higher profile target.

[Skinner]

SK - I knida suspected that's what happened with the ebay seller. So now I know, and have, a separate email account for that kind of thing. Of course, stupid me, I already knew to use different email accounts for places i didn't want to have my primary address. I wasn't thinking about it when I signed up for the ebay account. Lesson learned.

Hell I don't know going on. These people should be flogged. Anyone know of any programs that bounce spam back to the sender to make it look like your email address doesn't exist?

I tried one, spam killer, or something and it cut some of it down. Anyone had any luck with different one?

[Duality]

I had McAfee SpamKiller for about a year and a half or so, and it was wonderful. The only problem I had with it was that I never found a way to save the custom-made filtering rules.

However, I've been trying GLock SpamCombat (that uses baysien filters, DNS filters, and custom black/whitelists, rather than solid rules) and I happen to like it even more.

It catches about 95% of the spam I get sent to me, but has trouble learning obvious things -- such as my ISP's automatic {Spam?} and {Virus?} tags it adds to subjects.

[Skinner]

Cool, thanks.

The spam killer program i was using would bounce messages back to the sender saying the address was not valid and supposedly you would be taken off those lists. I noticed it worked on some but it didn't would on the return emails. I take a look at those two.

[stusser]

The best spam filters are k9 and popfile. Accuracy is roughly the same for both, around 99.98% for me. K9 runs faster and takes less RAM but is windows-only. Popfile is OS-agnostic.

According to my k9 statistics I get an average of 5,012 emails per day of which 6.28% are spam-- I get a lot of spam.

Both filters are POP3 only. I haven't found a really good IMAP clientside filter yet. Spambayes is supposed to be very good but I haven't tried it.

[Skinner]

Holy shit. You get 5,000 emails a day?

[stusser]

Yes, and 315 of them are spam!

[JeffL]

The problem with spam filters for me (I use Spambayes and it's pretty accurate) is that I always end up looking in the Junk Mail folder to make absolutely sure something isn't being thrown out by accident before deleting them for good. So, Spambayes (with Outlook) serves my purpose of separating the spam from the "good" email, but I'm not sure it saves me a lot of time since I still check the spam folder out anyway.

I've got someone who is sending viruses out using one of my email addresses as the return address - I've been getting the occassional "This email was undeliverable" reply message and it usually shows an email where an ISP has detected the virus and rejected it.

[Derek Meister]

5,000 emails and ONLY 315 of them are spam?! Wow. According to the statistics collected by POPFile, of the last 5,000 email message I got, only 919 were not spam.

Jeff, while I suffer from the same paranoia that you do, I find that even the act of going through my junk folder after POPFile filters things through still saves me time, as I simply do a "sort by sender" and scroll down through the list doing a quick eyeball for any addresses that aren't obviously spammers.

It also helps that POPFile has a nice page showing me the statistics of filtering, as I'm getting a 99.87% accuracy rate with no false-positives, which means my paranoia has subsided enough that I only check the junk folder once a week these days.

The other great use of POPFile is the fact that I have it trained well enough that it can actually tell which emails from my mother are actual email and not just another joke she forwarded to me, and assigns a low priority to the latter. I like that you can use bayesian filters to filter your email into catagories other than spam-notspam, such as personal, business, jokes, etc, etc.

[Skinner]

Thanks guys. This stuff looks great. I'll be checking it out.

[DrCrypt]

Here's a weird question: I would love to just train my spam filter in one go. Does anyone know if there is like some public access spam account out there that gets tons of spam that anyone can access? Like a public service POP3 account specifically set up to allow you to train your filters? I don't get enough spam right now to make any real headway but in the interests of maintaining a strong frontline I'd like to make sure my Popfilter is running as strong as possible.

[stusser]

Yes, overall my email is only 6.28% spam. I get a lot of work related email. We use email for alerts, etc, so it's stuff that I delete on a daily basis.

DrCrypt, yes, you can download someone else's corpus to train a bayesian filter but that takes away the entire point of using bayes. The idea is that the filter learns what *your* ham looks like and specifically filters for it. That's why bayesian filters are so effective. If you use someone else's rules you'll get lower accuracy over time. A properly trained bayesian filter gets a minimum of 3 9's in accuracy-- 99.9% is the low end. Properly trained, 99.97 to 99.99% accuracy is common. Every couple days I get a false negative. I never get false positives.

[DrCrypt]

Well, okay, but unless I'm missing something, wouldn't starting out with someone else's spam be a good starting point that could only lead to further refinement over time?

[Derek Meister]

Using someone else's pre-filtered stuff will be less efficient as mentioned above because the kind of email you get will be different than someone else. You really do have to train it equally on what is spam and what is not spam for it to work. In fact, if it's not trained on the type of mail you get, this could lead to a good number of false-positives that would take more time to "train out" than it would be to start from scratch.

The good news is that training it isn't hard, and isn't as long as you might suspect. Within a few days you should easily have better than 90%, by the end of the first week, 98% with a few possible false-positives. By two weeks, you'll definitely be in the highest end, with no false-positives likely.

[DrCrypt]

The "problem" is that my current email account doesn't have any spam at all coming in. That's great, but I know it can't last - I was getting about thirty spam a day on my old email account and the entire domain was eventually shut because it was basically being perpetually flooded with viruses and spam. So just at the pooiint when I started training Popfilter, the account was shut-down. Anyway, I know my request is weird and you're probably right, it just seems so silly to have it sitting half-trained in the system tray with absolutely no spam coming in anymore anyway.

[TimElhajj]

For a small fee, I will send you a little spam every day. Hope that helps. :)

[Timemaster Tim]

The "problem" is that my current email account doesn't have any spam at all coming in.

That being the case, I recommend that you turn off spam filtering. If you don't have the problem, then you don't need the solution. If and when you do start to get spam, turn on your fitlering, and then start training. The training period is quite short, and as others have mentioned, you will get better results training it with your emails.