Fighting Spam

Off topic but I thought I'd share something with you.

Over the last three months I have been testing anti-spam technologies. For a long time I have been relying on Mozilla Thunderbirds built in Junk mail controls for all my email accounts and it worked very well until about 3 or 4 months ago when I suddenly started seeing a much higher volume of spam and much of it was not being marked by thunderbird.

So I then started investigating better ways to tackle the problem.

The Spamato project is a java application that plugs in to various email applications, (Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird included) and processes incoming messages through 6 advanced filters. After a short period of training this seemed to catch at least 90% of all spam I received. To date it has missed 7.7% of spam and incorrectly identified 2.2%. These figures are improving every day but are much better than plain vanilla mozilla junk mail filter. Everytime Spamato detects a spam message a sample of the 'Spam song' sung by the Vikings in the Monty Python spam sketch is played. I haven't got irritated by it yet!



Now just detecting spam automatically and deleting it is not really Fighting spam is it? So the second stage of my spam fighting process is to try to shut down the spammers operations. This is not easy to do on your own, you would have to identify the origin of each message, determine if the address has been 'spoofed' or not and then send complaint letters to the administrators of the appropriate networks or ISP's. That's where SpamCop comes in. The website is a little confusing but the basic service they offer is giving you a unique email address @spamcop.net where you can forward your spam. Spamcop process the messages and within a few minutes you will have a response email giving links to the processed messages where YOU can then quickly forward complaints to the appropriate people. SpamCop handles spoofed IP's and other details, and also collects details the origin addresses so that if several spams originate from the same location the addresses are placed on a black list. Spam messages processed must be as fresh as possible. SpamCop will not process a message older than 48 hours.

It takes a little time and effort but I do get a good feeling doing it, also, importantly, I have noticed a significant drop in spam. An account where I would regularly get 20+ spams per day now rarely receives more than 10 and recently I have had a number of days where I have recieved no spam At all! Once in a while I get a nice feeling after reporting a 419 spammer and I get a response from their ISP that the account has been closed down.

There are a number of theories for this drop in spam. The least likely I'm afraid is that the spammer has been arrested/shot/hung, drawn and quartered (delete as appropriate.) The most likely situation is that some spammers have deleted my address from their list because the complaints that occaisionally get through to them become bothersome. They still continue to spam everyone else.