I don’t know what happened, but after a geek finished trying to clean up/fix my computer, I started to get an avalanche of spam.
I normally get a lot of spam, but this is just nuts. I can’t work. I now spend so much time on spam I can’t even find the good e-mail.
The spam has quadrupled minimum.
I stopped using Spam Assassin through CPanel over 1-1 1/2 years ago when there were issues with it & it was taking me hours to deal with every day.
At the time I tried to look for software, but got busy & then just opted for Thunderbird’s junk feature which works pretty well actually, but now this is just NUTS.
I don’t know why the flood gates have opened all of a sudden.
I thought that maybe Spam Arrest would work, as I’ve been on the receiving line of it before & I like how it works, but after contacting them to see if it would work for me, I had issues with their support.
They didn’t answer all my questions.
They don’t have a real phone number, they use throw aways or something similar, as when I call them back, it always says the number isn’t in use. Even one of the numbers they gave me didn’t work.
They actually (get a load of this), delete the tickets & I don’t mean delete them years later, but within a day, so there’s no way for them to review a ticket.
Then I read some bad reviews about them spamming their own service, & charging for support & charging really high prices, so I said forget it, I’ll try to find something else.
I use MailWasher Pro for pre-download viewing of headers (and a peak into the e-mail messages) and have it mark messages which are blacklisted by SpamHaus (don’t use that one - they block IP ranges indiscriminately) and SpamCop (which is teriffic). Additionally, you can setup your own blacklists (and delete unseen if you wish) and create filters (to prevent foreign alphabets, e.g., Chinese or Cyrillic/Russian). There is also a free version but the Pro is well worth the money.
SpamCop has always been great for me and I don’t object to the occasional minimal payment (for bandwidth) as I will rely on their recommendations quite a bit. I have had occasion to see that I’ve hit their blacklist occasionally but I believe that’s due to SPAMbots claiming to be me (using other IP addresses, NOT my EXIM!). Those are quickly gone (presumably because I report the “rejected e-mail” purporting to be from me to SpamCop).
I had had an instance on a past host where malware had gotten into my account and jammed my SMTP queue with SPAM. Thankfully, I’d throttled the VPS’s outgoing mail so the deluge was minimized but it was an experience I don’t want to repeat - the support team kept scanning my account with maldet to find and delete all malware and then installed it to run via CRON to identify any further malware intrusions.
That said, MailWasher Pro is the app I use to “view” all my e-mail before downloading to my computer. Some “suggested SPAM” and some I have on Delete get unchecked (Delete) and downloaded but very few. This has served (for years) to keep most SPAM and all malware from being downloaded. In general, I will Delete all e-mail from unknown parties but will often check the headers and the sneak peak into the messages marked Delete (not SPAM).
I’m the same way with SpamHaus, though, as I’d been on a server which was part of a BLOCK of IP addresses SpamHaus blocked. They would not “punch a hole” in their block of addresses for me and the host would not allow their EXIM to send e-mail from my dedicated IP Address (I left them - Site 5 - for this failure).
SPAM is a worldwide problem and I do my part to eradicate it as best I can (via SpamCop and not downloading as well as ensuring that maldet detects any malware which finds its way onto my server and prevents my server from contributing to the deluge).