Existing Spam...Best Practice to Address

[firepower]

Greetings. First off let me give lots of kudos to your team. SG is a FABULOUS service---the ability to create an address "on-the-fly" without logging in somewhere and doing it there first is GOLD!

I've been using SG for about a month now. I've gone back and updated my email address to a SG one just about everyplace I can think of that I may have ever registered (I can't wait to CATCH one of these places selling my new SG address!). This will help incredibly for any NEW spam, however, I continue to receive a LOT of spam at my original address.

As people who KNOW SPAM, what do you recommend as the best way to try and attack this? I know that the *easy* thing would be to "close" the old address, however, that would be a real pain plus it just irks me to "give in and surrender" to the spammers like that. Is it really a losing battle to "opt out" via most emails "unsubscribe" links (and therefore confirm your valid email address to them)? Do services like Spamcop really make any difference (at an individual level) since most of the servers spammers use are probably "hijacked" systems? ANY suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

THANKS!

Paul.

[josh]

I've got an alumni address that I got back in 1993. I was pretty free about using for usenet posting, and later, web guestbooks, etc.

It gets positively bombed with spam these days. I use spamassassin for it, and it's pretty good, and the bayesian filter is in full force, but lately about 10 messages a day have been slipping through. Filtering isn't perfect, of course, but at least I'm not wading through spam. It's pretty good about false positives, although I've had a couple.

I'm considering the challenge/response approach for that address -- I get so little real mail on it, that the annoyance factor probably won't be too high. I haven't used challenge/response before, but I've heard it's very effective.

I must admit that challenge/response is really annoying for senders, though. I get the replies from the spamgourmet confirmation emails that go out, and about 7 or 8 times a week, I get those verification messages from challenge/response systems. I generally click the links -- for most of them, clicking is enough. Some, though, have image recognition systems (like we're about to put up on spamgourmet ) and that's a problem for me because I use Pine and Lynx - these don't support graphics.... So, I copy the *#*^! url into Firebird and get presented with a *&*|#$ 9 digit number that needs to be typed into a web form )*(#@!!!

Needless to say, if you go this way, I'd choose a system that doesn't require the sender to tapdance and do backflips. The whole thing is (or recently was) embroiled in some patent controversy, too -- nothing can be easy these days, it seems.

Spamcop looks to be a very good system, and it benefits from a great deal of community support. Definitely worth checking out. I know we have some spamcop users on the spamgourmet team.