Each day, I start off by deleting spam: that delivered to my Blackberry, my desktop mail client, my online mail and my blog. It is perhaps the least productive part of my day. Spammers are creative: despite having spam filters everywhere (except on my BB – don’t like the way those filters work), I still deal with hundreds of spam emails that get through the filters. It seems that the spammers overwhelm the filters at night, since very few of them get through during the day. (The filter on my blog, Akismet, is very good. Rarely does one get through.) And I do have to review those caught in the spam filter because, invariably, there are a couple of legitimate ones in there.
So I was happy to read that the so-called “Godfather of Spam,” Alan Ralsky, was sentenced to 51 months in prison for sending emails in a bogus stock scheme. Three others were also convicted. According to the article, the group raked in nearly $3 million in the summer of 2005 alone.
The one thing that I find most annoying about spam – besides the content, of course – is the email spoofing. Probably half of the spam that I get looks like it is sent from one of my own email addresses. There seems to be little that I can do to stop that from happening. And such email spoofing sometimes causes me headaches: my own domains can end up on the spam lists of various servers and I end up having to go through a lot of headaches to get them off the lists. Which, of course, ends up benefiting the spammers.
Perhaps if more of the spammers were sent to prison, they would stop. And I wouldn’t have to clear out the endless emails touting Viagra, watches, and so forth. Nor would I have to deal with the emails that my clients forward to me supposedly from the IRS or the Social Security Administration. Not to mention the ones containing viruses that come from what appear to be real addresses of people I know.
Interestingly enough, I back up my email on Gmail and it seems to catch nearly all of the spam. So if the Gmail folks can figure out how to do that, I would hope that the other email providers out there would figure out the same. (And yes, I’ve been thinking about using Gmail to clean all of my mail before it comes into Outlook and my Blackberry. Just haven’t had the time to figure it all out yet.)
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Ditch the PC and get a Mac. No one is going to waste time designing pop-ups and viruses for them because so few people have them. I’ve had my mac for almost a year and I have only gotten maybe 2 pop-ups and not a single virus.
Not possible. All of the proprietary software that I use for work is only available on a PC.
1. Sign up with Appriver. Unbelievably strong, without any false positives.
2. So a white collar criminal bilks 3 million and gets a total (before good time deductions) of 4.25 years? Tell me a street criminal who steals a car worth 5k could get at least that much.
Len
I’ll take a look at Appriver. But Gmail is free 😀
Agree on the sentencing.
Good points Len!
I believe the “death penalty” should be reserved for Spammers as well as murderers. Murderers waste people, spammers waste our time. Better yet, bring them up before Judge Judy and let them feel her wrath! Sadly, with every good comes some bad, and with this wonderful technology of the internet, comes these leeches and blood suckers, known as spammers. Much like “political consultants” have attached themselves to politics!
Viv, you are on the right track with Gmail. I am an IT Manager and this free service is the best around.
I have several email accounts and have set up a gmail account for home, work and my Blackberry. I simply forward all of my accounts to all 3 gmail accounts. I then use pop3 to grab the emails.
One of my email addresses dates to the early 90’s and is pretty well circulated. I get hundreds of spams a day, all filtered by gmail.
One added benefit of gmail and Blackberry is that you can filter out emails that you really don’t want on the blackberry without making them spam. Just filter them out. Since my emails go to 3 places, I can read them at home, or at the office, but not on my Blackberry. I get email from online music stores, computer merchants, grocers, and several others. These are too graphical to view on the Blackberry, so I filter them out.
This has really solved my problems with spam.
How come you’re using POP3 instead of IMAP? I’ve been considering switching over to IMAP (for years, actually).
And you need to upgrade your BlackBerry: the newer ones handle HTML emails beautifully 🙂
The problem with GMail – besides any confidentiality concerns – is that it puts your eggs in someone else’s basket. In a big way. I got locked out of my primary GMail account last year (for nearly a month, iirc), and there was simply no way to contact Google in any meaningful way. It was incredibly frustrating, and they shut me out without notice/means of appeal/contacting a human being/etc. And then finally, poof, one day I had it back. I know Google’s got great stuff – until it breaks. I don’t rely on them for anything, anymore.
(There is Google Premier Edition – not out at the time, I think – which I might consider. I need to sort out the TOS first, though.)
The confidentiality thing is why I’ve stayed away from Google. Let me know what you find out on the Premier Edition.