I already tried account level filtering, and spam assassin, but nothing is working.
Problem is the email is coming from different sources everytime, and never has any common keywords like viagra or sex, casino etc. I am really at a loss at what to do.
Examples of some header info of emails coming through. Any help or guidance would be extremely appreciated.
Subject: Ellen looks youthful now
Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 09:20:41 -0700
From: Most Shocking Hollywood-Secret Revealed <Adrianna_Blake@knottednib.com>
Subject: This how Oprah did it
Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 08:34:32 -0700
From: Lose 10LB In Seven Days <Christina@hdeconstruction.gobmid.com>
I guess it depends on what your email address is used for if this would work for you or not.
For my personal inbox I accept only those I’ve whitelisted. All others go to the trash and I don’t need to look at them unless I’m expecting a “new” one not on the whitelist yet.
If it were a business where a lot might be new contacts I guess this wouldn’t work well as you’ld need to scan for real emails anyway.
Any “business” email I get is through my site’s contact form. I depend on server-side script to do the CAPTCHA, validating and sanitizing. This has worked OK for me, YMMV
The downside to gmail (and please don’t get me wrong… I love gmail… WAY better than hotmail, yahoo, etc.) is that sometimes their domain will block email coming from legit sources (for example, a forum support email account… I’ve had situations where I sent a helpdesk request to a forum support email address and thought I was being ignored when I never received a response after the fifth email… found out, later, that they HAD responded, but it never arrived, and was never in the Junk folder… it was completely blocked.)
You bring to light an interesting point, @WolfShade.
Regardless of your email provider I have learned to periodically browse the SPAM folder. There have been numerous times (even with GMail, @ralph_m ) I found misplaced messages there that were important to me.
Besides, it is a great boost to my ego seeing how many “Hot Young Girl wants to KNOW YOU better”
Without seeing the full email headers for an email then it is impossible to determine the best way to prevent these emails from reaching your inbox. Personally the #1 thing that has helped me prevent spam from reaching my inbox (it does prevent about 1-5% of legitimate emails from coming through) is by not accepting email from anyone who does not have a valid reverse DNS entry configured. Tons of spam is sent through computers infected with malware that sends SPAM. They never have a reverse DNS entry setup so the email is blocked right away at your mail server and never reaches your inbox. The steps to enable this are different for all of the different email servers.
DMARC is another new notable technology that should be investigated to help prevent SPAM from reaching your inbox. DMARC combines SPF and DomainKeys validation but it goes a step forward. It gives the owner of the domain where the emails appear to be originating from the ability to specify what happens to an email that does not come from an authorized mail server.
Gmail has been my primary email since it was in beta (2004? 2005?) and the only time this has ever happened to me is when I accidentally added a newsletter to spam instead of unsubscribing or from poorly thought out custom filters that auto-deleted things. In both cases it was my fault.
Yahoo and Hotmail on the other hand use things like TrendMicro Blacklisting, which blacklists tons of legit sources. My college used to get blacklisted all the time… and they used Hotmail as their email service! So internal emails would even be blocked. (they switched to Office 365 though and I’ve heard it’s better)
