Anti-SPAM efforts

[Dennis Burnham]

Title: Anti-SPAM efforts

In the hope that somebody has a better strategy for managing SPAM, I will describe what I have been doing.  Maybe this will help someone else, or maybe someone else has a better strategy.  

Since the junk mail filter has only limited effect in that it does not prevent the mail from arriving, I was looking for something more powerful now that my spam level is above 200 per day.  Moreover, I now pay for my spam when I receive email on my wireless PDA, so my intention is to stop it at the level of the mail server, which fortunately, I can control. In the mail server, I can block specific email addresses, domain names, IP addresses and/or usernames.

So, here is my step by step strategy:

1. I wrote a Rule in Entourage which (a) moves the item to the Deleted folder and (b) adds the sender to a group called “Spammers” if the sender is not already a member of the group.
2. From time to time, I revisit the Spammers group in my address book.  With the group open, I select all and then drag/drop the names into an open BBEdit document.
3. In BBEdit, I do two search/replace operations.  The first converts all instances of “>” to a carriage return and the second converts all instances of “<“ to a tab character.  I then select all, and copy the text, and then paste it into the first cell of an Excel file called “spammers.xls”.  (In successive sessions, I append the new entries to the end of the excel file.)  I then save and close the file.
4. I then open a FileMaker Pro database called “Spammers,fp5” in which a number of calculation fields have been written to derive things like user names, domain names, and email addresses from the two fields that get imported from Excel.  In FileMaker, there are also a number of export scripts which create text files that are ultimately used for copy/paste into the text area fields of the mail server’s admin page for mail blocking.  These scripts are all strung together so that a single command does everything necessary, including de-duplicate, sort, and so forth.  There is also a step which omits certain public domains like yahoo, msn, aol, etc so that I do not inadvertently block all mail from those domains just because I have detected some spam-senders with those email hosts.
5. Getting a list of IP addresses is more complicated.  I have to open the source of each and every item in the Deleted Mail folder and copy the IP address so that it can be put into the FileMaker database one by one.  That’s a pain.
   

I must say, this system has reduced my incoming spam down to about a dozen new ones a day.  With persistence, I might be able to tighten it up even further.  But I wonder if anyone else has a better modus-operandi.

Dennis Burnham