I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting a huge amount of spam over the recently.
I used to have my mailserver simply mark the incoming emails that it thought were spam, but still to send them to me. That stopped when the junk email load got to be over 1000 junk emails per day.
Now, however, if an email trips the junk email filter at the mailserver, the filter deletes it. It never gets to me or my email program.
Since I try to acknowledge all emails from subscribers, if I don’t respond to one you send within a few days, please check it for possible spaminess and then send it again.
Back to the current flood of junk — in addition to the usual ads for drugs of all sorts, diplomas of your choice, notices of failed deliveries from national delivery services, and ads for fake watches, there are nasty ones that have attachments to infect your computer with malware. There are some nasty phishing emails, too.
Phishing emails — these are the emails that pretend to be from someone you might trust, in order to get you to disclose user ID’s, passwords, social security numbers, bank account data, and such personal information — so they can pretend to be you to empty your bank account or to send spam from your ISP or Facebook account.
One of the frequent ones recently has purported to be a notice from the Internal Revenue Service about unreported income. A slight variation on that was a British version. Now, I don’t see those any more because my mailserver is deleting them.
Another nasty is trying to take advantage of Facebook users. There are a couple variations, one of which is reported to stick you with some malware, too.
Be sure that you run a good anti-spam program. A couple I like are Mailwasher Pro and PopFile. Mailwasher Pro classifies emails as spam or not while they’re still at your ISP’s mailserver, before you ever download them. it allows you to review the first few lines of emails, if you like, before you take any action on them.
PopFile uses a different approach. It sits on your computer and reconfigures your email program to talk to PopFile, and PopFile to talk to your ISP. That way, it can check emails as they’re downloaded. It will label them as spam or junk, but they you have to set up "rules" in your email program to actually handle the spam (e.g., to discard emails that are labeled as spam).
Final tip: always filter the emails to a folder where you can review them before you delete them. Murphy’s Law of EMail says: "The more important an email is, the more likely your (or your mailserver’s) anti-spam program will mis-classify it as spam." (This happens in the corporate world, too!).
and