Boas1 said:
Using Outlook 2003, the spam filter was working great to block
unwanted junk
messages. For the past week, spam is getting to my Inbox and not being
blocked even though Junk Mail is sent to high and is turned on. Is
this
because I have too many blocked addresses? I have been using it for
about 18
months.
Thanks
Blocked addresses only work to block mails from someone that is so
stupid as to always use the same e-mail address when sending you
unwanted mails. Spammers change their e-mail address everytime they
spew their next crop of crap. Blocking on one of those e-mail addresses
does nothing to deter their next spam that has a different e-mail
address. It is guaranteed that those thousands of e-mail addresses that
you have in the Blocked Senders list are absolutely worthless against
spam. You already received their spam once so adding their e-mail
address won't block any more spam from them because they are not going
to use the same e-mail address as before.
Ding dong. You answer the door.
"Hi, I'm John and I'm selling ..."
"Not interested." Close door, add John to list of blocked visitors.
Ding dong.
"Hi, I'm Mark and I'm ..."
"You look like John."
"No, I'm Mark and I'm selling ..."
Close door, add Mark to your block list.
Ding dong.
"Hi, I'm Miguel and I'm ..."
"You look like Mark that looked like John."
"No, I'm Miguel and I'm selling ..."
Close door. Add Miguel to your block list.
And the stupidity continues because blocking by name is absolutely
worthless since the spammer never uses their own and constant e-mail
address. They use someone else's e-mail address or they make it up
on-the-fly. You don't need to add their e-mail address for the spam
that you already received because obviously that one didn't get blocked
and you won't block using it on any future spam mails because it won't
get used again.
I have seen users complain about continuing to get spam that have over
3000 e-mail addresses in their Blocked Senders list. The spammers don't
care that you waste the time blocking on an e-mail address that they
will not use again.
If spam is getting past the weak filtering included within OL2003 then
incorporate further spam filtering to eliminate the crap. SpamPal is
free. It uses DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) of known spam source - but be
careful which blacklists you select to use. It can use Bayesian via a
plug-in. There are several plug-ins. While the spammers will use bogus
e-mail addresses, often they spew, even if momentary, from the same IP
source. Have you ever bothered to check if the spam filter is enabled
on our mailbox? Use the webmail interface to your e-mail account and
check its options to ensure spam filtering is enabled there.
Server-side spam filtering is preferrable to client-side spam filtering.
Even if your e-mail provider's spam filter is "loose" (lots of spam
leaks past), any that you get rid of up on the server means fewer that
you have handle using your client-side anti-spam solution.
Microsoft never reveals how it does its spam filtering. It seems to be
Bayesian-like. Bayesian databases can be poisoned unless it allows some
configuration to alter its behavior based on volume, rate of incoming
mails, expiry of old words that are no longer present after a period of
time in any further e-mails, and so on. Some spams seems to be
deliberately coded to poison Bayesian filters. OL2003 doesn't let you
configure an expiration for old and no-longer-used words in your
e-mails. Does it let you configure a set of words that are NOT to be
included in their Bayesian weighting? Does it allow you to specify the
number of keywords extracted from an e-mail to use in its weighting?
Does their Bayesian filter learn which are bad mails from other methods
of spam detection? Since images cannot be inspected for what appears to
be words to you, Bayesian filtering fails on spam that is contained
within images in the e-mail (SpamPal's Bayesian filter cannot look
inside, either, but you can use its RegEx plug-in to define a filter to
look for .gif MIME parts within the body since it is unlikely that
anyone from whom you want e-mail will be using GIF).
As a basic spam filter, the one in OL2003 is better than nothing. You
might want to consider other anti-spam products to use instead of or in
addition to OL2003's junk filter. There are many freebie anti-spam
products available. Besides SpamPal, there is Mailwasher (but NEVER use
its bounceback "feature"), SpamBayes (which only provides Bayesian
filtering), and many commercial products (if it is free and good, I
prefer those).
