OT Antispam

Go to the properties for your news account (tools, accounts, properties) and edit the entry for your e-mail address to something entirely bogus if you want no-one to e-mail you from the group or something obvious to fool the spambots like:

snipped-for-privacy@bigpond.net.au

HTH.

I've just checked the Telstra (BigPond) system, as my old fella uses their broadband service. Which I have to say is damned expensive and metered to boot! I've had to abandon plans to FTP my photos to my webserver as the 512Mb monthly limit won't do it.

Upshot is, they don't have any spam filtering service that I can see. So a fake reply address seems the only option.

Are you around at all for a meet up and tyre kick? Went to the Wandin show today, but at 38 degress it was just too damned hot to hang around for long. Indoors at Donington suddenly seemed very appealing...

The one problem you will have is that if your address is already out there, it will keep turning up.

I also notice you have not put 'I don't need penis enlargment pills' on your list, now everyone I know gets that one. Is there something you want to share with the group Simon?

Regards

D (3 foot long and growing!!)

Well !!!! :-) Enough said.

Simon Mills Vic.Aust.

98 tdi Disco

Also down load a free copy of mailwasher, this programme is brilliant, it allows you to preview your messages and delete them before downloading, you can also bounce messages back to where it came so it looks as i your e-mail is a dud. It also gives you a blacklist option as well. I also had the west african bank one as featured on tv , i sent a reply asking for £1000 up front then i would help. Still i have not got a reply though. :o)

GGJ

Your ISP will appreciate it more if you do it like this:

snipped-for-privacy@REMOVETHISBITbigpond.net.au

Otherwise they receive all the spam as the domain (bit after the @) is correct. In fact in some cases it contravenes the contract between you and your ISP if you spamblock on the user side of the @ rather than the domain side.

HTH

Lizzy

Or even use snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net which bounces all the spam back to them, you can then use Lizzys obvious type of spam block on your reply address if you want.

I noticed somebody in this ng using something@127.0.0.1 - does this work?

It's frowned upon in some circles, but 127.0.0.1 is the loopback IP address, and so anything sent to that address will never leave the machine which sends it. It's not going to generate useless traffic on the rest of the net.

If you're a Windows user have a look for the hosts.sam file, where you will find an entry linking that IP address with the name "localhost". It can be worth having that entry in the actual "hosts" file, if you have one. The hosts file is a simple way of giving names to machines on a small LAN, but there are all sorts of complications which can arise from using it. "localhost" is OK, and useful, but be on guard for unexpected changes to the file.

On or around Sun, 15 Feb 2004 01:32:20 GMT, "Simon Mills" enlightened us thusly:

too late. once yer address has leaked out, that's it. however... mostly people put "feckoffspamminggits" or simialr in the address. If your news service requires a valid "from" address, try " snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net"

set these things in the newsreader software, where you put your address in.

hrrrrrawwwkk-ptooie!!

On or around Sun, 15 Feb 2004 02:22:06 GMT, "Exit" enlightened us thusly:

except that if you have a multi-address thing, that'll get delivered to you anyway. You can, however, filter for the "REMOVETHISBIT" and auot-delete the things that arrive with it in.

forexample, @ddol-las.etc gets through to me. some stuff gets deleted unread, other things get checked first

On or around Sun, 15 Feb 2004 14:04:23 +0000 (UTC), "Gary G Jones" enlightened us thusly:

mailwasher is pretty good. There's also a thing called pop3 scanmailbox or somesuch.

general consensus is that bouncing stuff is a waste of time these days. In my observation it made no difference to the volume of spam on an already-compromised address, just made the mail downloading process take longer, so I gave it up.

I may start putting a spam-trap code in, though, to allow auto-filtering.

That could be me, I can't remember the significance though other than

127.0.0.1 is a legitimate dummy address on your own computer and it doesn't interfere with bandwith.

It is better than using something like snipped-for-privacy@spambin.fsnet.co.uk which could be someone elses *valid* e-mail address IYSWIM.

Steve.

[snip]

I've not bothered reporting spam for the same reason, Most spam contains bogus addresses anyway.

Steve.

[snip]

Well put David ;)

I wonder if it makes any difference with me not using Windows?, I've not experienced any problems since using it.

Steve.

I think I mentioned on here that my email address for the rescue team was pinched as a return address for spam.

This resulted in them being able to send all of the mail out, and me getting all of the 'user no longer known' 'mail server error' 'I'm only 9, stop sending me all this pill stuff!!!' messages to my inbox.

I figure i'm up to 10,000 plus in a month.

As a result I have had to move the website, which is annoying to say the least.

D tvlb.org

BUT some of the harvesters can and do repair the domain name, it's your unique identifier they are after.

You need to put the 127.0.0.1 in square brackets ie adam@[127.0.0.1] to cause a loopback but it doesn't really matter as any false address will work. In anycase most spammers will filter these out of their databases anyway.

A

you