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Open thread: Favorite spam blocker service?

I've been relatively fortunate with filtering spam over the past couple years (knock on wood). But despite a kickass three-tiered system that includes the world-beating server-side Sieve, plus Mail.app's pretty good client filtering, it's inevitable that even my best-loved private email addresses would find their way into the wrong hands (it's why I recently created "ThanksNo.com" -- an experiment in social re-engineering that you are free to use as well).

So, now that the spelling-impaired Lords of The Dark Side have such renewed interest in my investment options and genital proportions, I'm considering joining a service like Spam Arrest or the apparently deceased Knowspam. I mostly plan to run this on the addresses I use for strictly personal stuff, so I'm satisfied I can start with a "whitelist" to ensure I don't generate loops or dead ends for the "good" senders. But, you tell me...

Apart from running smart filters on your server and in your mail client, what's the best way to protect a mydomain.com-type email address from becoming compromised and punked-out? What are the dangers and cons of using a challenge/response service like Spam Arrest? Apart from abandoning it wholesale, what's the most effective and non-annoying way to rehabilitate a compromised address?

TOPICS: Email, Vox Populi
Darren Fricker's picture

I used to forward all...

I used to forward all my email via Gmail to have it spam cleaned & then sent on to me@mydomain.org - it works very, very well [only had maybe 2 false positives in several months, approx. 20 spams per day, & they were stored by Gmail for me so were retrievable]. Gmail has added an option to send mail as me@mydomain.org, so now I just do everything in Gmail. No more bothering about losing messages if Windows crashes or I need to reinstall, less chance of downloading nasties onto my hard drive, excellent search facilities & it's free. Only minus is that I prefer the UI of a 'proper' email client but I find the positives outweigh the negatives here.

Another tactic I saw somewhere was that someone used to append the year onto his email address, eg, this year he was me2006@mydomain.org. Next year he'd change it to me2007@mydomain.org. Humans tended to catch onto the difference, spammers couldn't so all incorrectly addressed messages went > null.

 
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