From: "Bryce Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: firewall to combat spam
Since I have gone to Sympatico, the amount of spam has increased horribly.
Welcome to Sympatico. For the record, they've been absolutely negligent in protecting their SMTP servers for spam distribution over the last year or so. I've been a Sympatico user for close to six years now, and my Sympatico account only became a serious SPAM conduit over the last eight months or so. Shortly before they started selling PC security and anti-spam software on their site, coincidentally...
I even put a false address in for my web browser as I figured that was where most of the spammers weregetting my e-mail address.
Nope. I figure they haven't secured their SMTP account list properly. Which would explain their disclaimers on data security.
Out of say 100 e-mails, over 75 are spam. You name it the spam ist here.
Now granted I do
a lot of web browsing, and yes some sites are not what clean living
people might enjoy;
however the increase is beyond belief.
Geez, must be worse in Ontario; mine only generates 15 to 20 per 100 messages. Mind you, the majority of the spam comes from the US, and targets the "english speaking clientele". Vive la diff�rence.
Yes I can put up some form of jkill file, however the crap still flows.
Use the latest version of Jaguar. Activate your junk mail training mode, leave it on, oh, about two or three weeks. Identify as much junk crap as you can, then set the junk mail mode to automatic. See the stuff disappear before your very eyes.
Have tried to trace the sources; most of it originates with headers from
yahoogroups, however,
upon further checking yhre spam comes from China, and Oriental countries
as well as Russia.
Or spoofed to appear to come from there, anyway.
Anybody got any suggestions as to a good firewall program, that works, and is easy to maintain?
Are you running X? If so, the built-in OS X one is a good start. Under system 9 or 8, I like NetBarrier. Mind you, it won't help you much; that crap travels through your Sympatico mail account; what will you do, turn off ports 25 and 110 altogether? Perhaps you meant a spam filtering program? If so, you'll have to jump through a few hoops; most spam filtering packages run in conjunction with a mail server, and this is the kind of stuff that really works better if you're running a mail server on a different box. There are also some mail clients with robust spam filtering capabilities. At least, we can count our blessings; on Windows boxes, systems bog down from email virus attachments and other calamities, on top of the spam.
Ideally I'd like to see the spam bounced back to the sender however that
may well be asking too much.
OS X mail does that already. Select mail marked as junk. Then go to the Message menu, and select the Bounce to sender option. Then watch the bulk of them generate replies from mail server administrators stating that your message couldn't be delivered because the account doesn't exist. 9 out of 10 spam addresses are spoofed, and the 10th one is usually full...
Have thought of changing ISP's again including signon name, but asn oted
here earlier,
most ISP's are far too stupid in their thinking to be able to accomodate
the likes of us Macintosh users.
Bryce, I kept my Sympatico account for internet and web access only. I do the bulk of my email work off the mac.com account. Haven't had a single bit of spam off the dotMac account yet (knock on wood). Can't get more Mac friendly than this.
Hope this helps.
Chris
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