Official Luthiers Forum!

Can anyone recommend a good e-mail anti spam program. I'm getting clobbered every day with junk e-mail. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

"The Zootman"

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Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

Mozilla Thunderbird is an option. The nice thing about Thunderbird is that you can "teach" it what is junk and what isn't. It works very well. It only took me a couple of weeks to get my span down to a couple of emails a month.

I agree with Hesh that Outlook is good, but I've not had as much luck teaching it. I have to use Outlook at work and like almost every other aspect of it.

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nay

My blogs
Hand Made Gutar
Woodworker++

[QUOTE=Hesh1956] Thunderbird is free too right?[/QUOTE] Yep I've been using it for a couple of years and I'm happy with it.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

Thanks
I do use Outlook but like a dummy I have been using it in conjuction with McAfee spam killer. McAfee adds an icon to Outlook. I didn't realize that I'm trying to use parts from both. I'm disabling McAfee and using the make rule from message in O EX and see how that goes for a while. If not I'll try Thunderbird.

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Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

[QUOTE=Bobc]I'm disabling McAfee and using the make rule from message in O EX and see how that goes for a while.[/QUOTE]

Bob, if I understand correctly you're using Outlook Express? That version of Outlook is very limited compared with "Outlook" that comes with MS Office. You can buy Outlook seperately, but the last time I looked it was around $129. If you are using Outlook Express then I re-iterate my recommendation of Thunderbird. If you need any help with Thunderbird I'll be glad to give you a hand. If I'm not mistaken when you startup Thunderbird for the first time it'll even import your OUtlook or Outlook Express settings, etc.

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nay

My blogs
Hand Made Gutar
Woodworker++

[QUOTE=Hesh1956]   Be advised that this can catch emails that you want to receive too.

.... With this said Outlook catches about 90% of my spam but I still check the spam file before deleting it and often find emails that are not spam.

[/QUOTE]

This is the reason that I disabled the spam filter that my ISP provides...important emails from eBay customers (and sellers) and other stuff (like notices from my brokerage firm about new issues) were being deleted. I have had the unhappy experience of trying to deal with contacts who had their spam filters so locked up that communication was impossible.

Manually deleting the 10-20 spams I get every day takes only a few seconds, and is worth the trouble so that I know I'm not missing anything important. For me, it's less work than going to a junk folder and checking the deletes.
This scheme would probably not work so well if you were getting hundreds of spams/day. It does pay to have a 'junk' email address (yahoo or similar) that you use when posting on public forums, but it certainly isn't complete insurance against the spam deluge.

John

   I just use the junk button on my hotmail account and it did wonders! I also have a junk address that worked very well!

   It's my buddy Ernie's account ErnieT@hotmail.com! If you want to use it your welcome!!!

   You should see the amount of junk that guy gets!!!

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Billy Dean Thomas
Covina, CA

"Multi famam, conscientiam, pauci verentur."
(Many fear their reputation, few their conscience)

I do have MS Office 2000. Just never used Microsoft Outlook. The problem I'm sure is from my website. That's where their picking up my e-mail addresses. Maybe if I buy a few Rolez watches, some Viagra and a penis enlarger they will leave me alone.
erniet@hotmail.com

_________________
Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

I've been using Microsoft Vista since last November and the spam killer in it's new version of Outlook Express (now called Microsoft Mail) is absolutely dynamite.

No configuration and it catches absolutely everything with only the occaisonal false positive.

Probably not worth upgrading just for that but something to bear in mind if you need a new PC.

Cheers

Bob

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Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia

Well with 3 laptops and 1 workstation I don't think i'll be buying a new PC any time soon. I wonder how painless the upgrade to Vista is? Has anyone here upgraded to Vista?

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Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

Bob

I did a fresh install of Vista so I'm not sure of how well it upgrades. I'm also not a fan of upgrading as I think blowing the 'old cobwebs' away will give you a much more efficient and stable PC.

Having said that, Microsoft did a pretty good job with the upgrade path to XP so I don't see that Vista would be any different.

The biggest issue I have found is that Vista is not that sympathetic to legacy (older) hardware that you may have hanging off your PC.

I have a scanner, an IR port and an older Kodak webcam that I can't get to run under Vista. So they are now attached to other computers in the house. But they were all getting a bit long in the tooth and needed replacing anyway.

The security model that has been implemented in Vista is maybe one of the most appealing aspects of it making it quite difficult for viruses and malware/spyware to install.

Cheers

Bob

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Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia

[QUOTE=bob_connor]
The security model that has been implemented in Vista is maybe one of the most appealing aspects of it making it quite difficult for viruses and malware/spyware to install.
[/QUOTE]

Agreed, it's just 10 years too late

_________________
nay

My blogs
Hand Made Gutar
Woodworker++

Thanks to everyone for the great advice. I knew I would get some good suggestions here. The OLF Rocks.

_________________
Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

[QUOTE=nathan c] [QUOTE=bob_connor]
The security model that has been implemented in Vista is maybe one of the most appealing aspects of it making it quite difficult for viruses and malware/spyware to install.
[/QUOTE]

Agreed, it's just 10 years too late [/QUOTE]

Having said that, Nathan, I reckon the average PC user will be somewhat confused and at times aggravated at the way some things work in Vista.

If you log on as administrator, it will still run all of your programs and processes as a 'user' which has far less privileges than an admin.

When you try to install software or try to access some of the administrative controls you get a pop up box which asks if you really want to elevate your privileges to allow this.

You can turn this off but that defeats the security model that has been put in place.

If you want real security use Open-BSD. But for most PC users, trying to get your head around Unix type systems is just too hard. It's just too different for people who have been bought up on Windows.

Cheers

Bob

Cheers

Bob

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Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia

Bob and Nathan...

Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate have a Unix compatible subsystem (Microsoft is a USL licensee) that will give you all of the functionality that you have in any other XPG4, Spec 1170 Unix (BSD or V.4) or Unix like (Linux) system including every utility, shell, compilers and over 1800 Unix APIs for porting code from one POSIX based OS to another.

It is part of the base OS but not turned on by default. It is listed under other windows components as Services for Unix Applications. I allows me to do things like running parallelized FORTRAN applications since my parallel FORTRAN compiler compiles for SUA.

In almost every case regardless of Unix or Linux variant I can FTP source and if there is a makefile, run it and end up with a native Windows executable without having to hack alot of code. It will still have the look and feel of the previous OS so I will still to have the libraries available for that UI (Motif, X11, etc) but it is a native executable.

Neither of you snarcing at Windows Vista or Windows security help Bob or any other enduser to know how to get rid of spam.

Bob...Microsoft doesnt write the device drivers for hardware, hardware vendors write them and if they need help Microsoft provides assistance. In the case of both scanners and digital webcams, most hardware vendors are not very interested in creating new drivers as the shelf life for those kinds of hardware is much shorter than their lifecycle in service.

In the case of the IR port, if it is on the motherboard you should check the manufacturers website to see if they have an updated driver. They may even have the source available as well since people run BSD and Linux on PC hardware as well. In the true Unix and Linux spirit, instead of grousing about Microsoft not supporting a third parties out of date hardware drivers, why dont you just compile it yourself. Microsoft freely releases all of its device driver kits for each OS...

I loved the joke about "if you want real security use Open-BSD" ...it was NSA and Microsoft that co-authored the Windows Vista Security guide, with comments and additions from NIST...

Geeks that bash (not the shell ) other OSs usually have either a religious reason (they love their favorite OS) or a political agenda (such as they dont like Microsoft, Apple, whatever) and for a geek that is no different than Serge saying "God Loves You".

[QUOTE=Bobc] Maybe if I buy a few Rolez watches, some Viagra and a penis enlarger they will leave me alone.
erniet@hotmail.com
[/QUOTE]

It doesn't work!!!
And they still haven't sent me my $10,000,000,000,000.01

Paul

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Paul Bordeaux
http://www.bordeauxinlay.com

Bob,

To decrease spam, you should not have your e-mail address written in your
source code. I am not a web programmer, but my son is, and he says there
are ways to allow for people to e-mail you without using a direct e-mail
address link. This makes it much harder for the spam-bots to pick up the
address. I know that one simple method is to display your address only in a
picture file - the spammers can't read it, but it requires people to manually
write it into their address line of an e-mail. It works, but there are more
elegant techniques.

Brook

Well I downloaded Thunderbird and so far so good. I still need to learn a few thing like how to get my signature to insert where the cursor is when I reply to an e-mail. It inserts at the bottom of the e-mail I'm replying to.

_________________
Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

Bob, glad you like it so far. here's a link to a blog that tells you how to put your reply above the quoted mail. this should also move your signature above the message.

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nay

My blogs
Hand Made Gutar
Woodworker++

[QUOTE=BrookM] Bob,To decrease spam, you should not have your e-mail address written in your source code.[/QUOTE]

Agreed. While it may not be a issue for low-traffic sites, spam bots are constantly in search of mailto: links to add to their databases. If you're looking to keep your e-mail address from being grabbed off of your website, and don't want to remove the interactive aspect of the mailto: link, then you can use some script-based methods.

To the best of my knowledge, using a web-based submission form to accept e-mail (possibly with some sort of verification step) can go a long way to prevent your address from being lifted. For example, you could create a form very similar to the one used on this forum to post responses (this can all be done in HTML). From here, your form could call a PHP script that takes the sender's e-mail address along with the text of the message and sends it to your e-mail address.

Because your e-mail address will only exist in the script that processes the messages (which cannot be viewed by people accessing your site), your e-mail address *should* be safe (correct me if I'm wrong).

Alan

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Alan Degenhart
Volcano Guitar Works
http://www.volcanoguitarworks.com