Spammed out of control

[Matt]

Hoping someone can help me here, in the past few weeks I have been getting an insane amount of spam - almost all investment opportunities.

I dont want to go playing with my Outlook junk mail levels too much (then it just knocks out legitimate mail), is there anything else I can do/use?

I try to avoid putting my work email address 'out there' as much as possible, but in my business, some exposure is inevitable (ie my contact details on client websites as a media contact point/on the footer of press releases etc) - that cant really be avoided.

Ive set up some filters to try to shoot it out, but because they all do things like write "iMvestment opportunity" and "i.n.v.e.s.t" etc its impossible to get all the combinations.

Driving me crazy, suggestions wanted

 

[Nantucket Red]

Forget about investment. Buy generic viagra.

 

[LabelKing]

Originally Posted by Nantucket Red

Forget about investment. Buy generic viagra.

The best investment is increasing ********** size.

 

[Kent Wang]

I see a lot of potential growth in that sector.

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Kent Wang

I see a lot of potential growth in that sector.
in Asia maybe. back to my spam please!!!

 

[Tokyo Slim]

Stop looking at so much internet Appreciation... thats where it all comes from. Delete all your cookies and clear out your temp folder. That, and get a good spyware sweeper, you probably have a trojan or browser hijacker on your computer.

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim

Stop looking at so much internet Appreciation... thats where it all comes from. Delete all your cookies and clear out your temp folder. That, and get a good spyware sweeper, you probably have a trojan or browser hijacker on your computer.

nice thought, but no go. New hard disk as at three days ago (other issues), but whatever was in the cache etc went out with the old drive

 

[Tokyo Slim]

Hmm... then there isn't anything you can do but wait it out. And stop looking at so much internet Appreciation.

Maybe you should stop using Outlook while you are at it. Ugh.

 

[EL72]

Originally Posted by Tokyo Slim

And stop looking at so much internet Appreciation.

Do you have any serious recommendations?

I ask because I was infected with some serious trojan crap recently. Tried the usual spybot, ewido, hijackthis... but the f*ckers were impossible to delete. The buggers kept launching constant pop-ups saying I have been infected and launching a web page where I could download more software to correct the problem. I could see which dll files were causing the problem but they were undeletable.

I followed instructions to use Smitfraudfix in safe mode to fix the problems but still no dice. This was the most sophisticated and persistent trojan I have ever encountered. Finally, I simply used Killbox (a SW to delete seemingly undeletable files) to remove the registry files that were causing it (PCODEC is the name of one of them).

Anyway, I got rid of the popups but since then, my computer is slow like molasses and a real pain to use. Short of reformatting my hard disk, any ideas on how to clean my PC?

BTW Matt, spam is one of the nuisances I have learned to tolerate. If your address is posted online, there is not much you can do in my experience. I get hundreds a day and still have to go through my junk mail folder given the odd important email that gets dumped there.

 

[CoryB]

I run custom filters. Observe the key words that are getting through your current junk mail and then write a filter using those words that sends to a junk mail folder. Depending on what your business is, you can easily eliminate a large amount of email this way. I presume some of your valid mail would contain words like "investment" and "stock". If you find the correct words you will almost never need to look through the junk folder. Put the obvious words like "penis enlargement", "Appreciation", etc. and likely it will clear some of it.

The majority of my junk mail is tagged "possible spam" by my ISP before reaching me. I just the tag "possible spam" in conjuction with my custom filters to block nearly 100% of junk with a very low error rate.

Also for you website you may wish to put a tag in the subject line to ensure that real emails are readily visible. To make a subject line come up when the mailto link is clicked change it from "mailto:[email protected]" to "mailto:[email protected]?subject=Online Query".

 

[faustian bargain]

you could change your 'out there' email address to be more of a spamcatcher, and save your personal business address for real communication to other people. coryB's suggestion with the subject field is good too.

i guess another idea would be to use some kind of alternate means of soliciting email contacts that doesn't entail posting your actual address, i.e. a link to an online form or some such.

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by CoryB

I run custom filters. Observe the key words that are getting through your current junk mail and then write a filter using those words that sends to a junk mail folder. Depending on what your business is, you can easily eliminate a large amount of email this way. I presume some of your valid mail would contain words like "investment" and "stock". If you find the correct words you will almost never need to look through the junk folder. Put the obvious words like "penis enlargement", "Appreciation", etc. and likely it will clear some of it.
yeah the problem with that is that the spammers are too smart, and they know that i am going to filter out "viagara" so they spell it "v1agara" and then "vi@gara" and the countless other possible combinations therein....

 

[Kent Wang]

Matt, I was hoping someone would chime in here but it appears that no one has provided an effective solution so I will tell you what I use. SpamBayes is an adaptive Bayesian filter with an Outlook plugin. It can sort spam into good, spam and uncertain. Only about 1% of spam ends up in uncertain, the rest are properly identified as spam. There are a few false positives that also end up in uncertain but the amount of manual sorting you have to do is minimal.

 

[CaptChaos]

Originally Posted by EL72

Anyway, I got rid of the popups but since then, my computer is slow like molasses and a real pain to use. Short of reformatting my hard disk, any ideas on how to clean my PC?

Nuke it from orbit (reformat), it is the only way to be sure.

 

[Rome]

You could try the repair feature with the installation disk. I would also check the Task Manager for any processes that may be taking up a lot of memory or cpu usage.