Jeremy Taffel wrote:
I just had a look at my freeserve (wanadoo now) account. I have stopped using it because of the volume of spam. Over 4000 spams since mid-March! About 600 had virus attachments. Many did not even have my email address from what I could tell (how does that work?).
Freeserve gives you an [effective] email domain.
When you set up your account, your choose a userid and a domain:
<userid> @ <domain> . {freeserve|fsnet|fsbusiness} . co . ukwhen email is sent to you, the freeserve servers split it at the <domain> bit. You then download either email for an individual <userid> by logging into their pop server using "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", or you can download all emails at your domain by logging in using "domain..." - in which case, regardless of whatever userids have been used, you'll get all email sent to your domain (thus making it dead easy to set up unique email accounts for those places that insist on them; and you can then trace any possible spam source if it arrives at one of these userids).
Unless you are referring to the "To:" field not containing your e-addr, like this:
From: "Terry Carroll" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: *** SPAM *** Fwd: Re: Low Cost Term Life ins. Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 05:51:18 -0200
However, if you look at the headers of the message, you'll see that the mail system has used this field to deliver the mail:
Envelope-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It's like a buisness letter where you put their address on the letter and then put it in a window envelope (that's the "To:" field), stick an address label over the window with a different address (the "Envelope-to:" field), and then the recipient's secretary removes it from the envelope and gives it to her boss (who only sees the "To:" field - by checking the envelope {ie mail headers} he can see what really happened).
...
This is a strange thing to write about one of our favourite hates, but hotmail is virtually spam free. They have a special bulk mailings box from which only the headers are downloaded and then only on request.
Technically not spam free; just spam-hidden. The problem with ISPs hiding spam like this is that people forget how much of a problem spam really is - it's being swept under the carpet, but the carpet is now getting rather lumpy and the ceiling is getting lower; eventually there will be no more room under the carpet and then the spam will explode out and everyone will ask (a) from where it's all suddenly come, (b) what we going to do about it and (c) why didn't anyone do anything much earlier when it was manageable.
You can quickly look through these for genuine mail. This means very little spam actually gets through to your inbox. It is one of the reasons I keep a hotmail account and why this is the contact email address I use on my QL (on topic!) websites. If hotmail can do this, why can't others?
The pop protocol includes downloading headers, and deleting without downloading. I know where my spam arrives (the majority at "Envelope-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]") and so I could write my own version of fetchmail (*nix command to download email from a pop server) to auto-delete any message with a header including "Envelope-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]" without downloading it.
Freeserve/Wanadoo have introduced SPAM filters and mark messages as spam for you. Using their Web interface to your email, you now have options to correct the filters and bulk-delete all messages marked as SPAM without having to download them. (You can [auto-]shuffle the SPAM to a bulk-mailing folder [I think] on their servers.)
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