I hate spam. I hate it so much I've put a very brutal message in the middle of my privacy statement at http://www.andrebell.com/privacy.html

I have around 40 antispam filters setup, spam assasin enabled, and spam boxtrapper enabled on my server to catch and kill most of the garbage.

Still, every day at least 100 spam messages arrive into my outlook delete folder with various spoofed and misspelled version of vigra (istead of viagra) and other spam words.

And at least once a month I get some spammer who visits my contact form and sends me spam, as if my warning on that page doesn't apply to him. I used to get 50+ to my contact form monthly, now it's down to one or two since adding the warning message. Mostly people in foreign countries I can't touch still spam through my contact form.

Anyhow, is there an attorney you know somewhere who is good at collecting money from spammers, or at the very least could tell me if my antispam warning on my privacy page is enforceable against U.S. businesses that spam anyways?

Thanks.

Mr. Frustrated

It wouldn't be nonexistent, because if that ever happened, they would find a way to fill out that form on autopilot.

Thanks Subtle. I used spampepper for a while. Removed it after too many people posted complaints to my contact form that all my emails were 'bouncing'.

Seems they had no idea what a challenge/response system was, so they assumed my email was 'broken'.

It certainly is the best way to avoid spammers but some people are not smart enough to READ to click a simple link in email and confirm tey are a real person. Defintely was the best choice for keeping my inbox clean though.

Andre

Are you running cPanel on your server? Are you running your own server, or a VPS, or...?

I'm asking just to get some background info so I can tailor my response -- I might have a pile of info/a great solution for ya'. We just installed a new spam filtering package on our servers and our clients LOVE it.. if you're running your own box, depending on what you're running, I'd be happy to recommend them, as well as explain how it works & why it works so well. It has honest-to-God just knocked my socks off... it's so nice to be surprised by a truly kick-butt solution for once. But depending on how your hosting's set up, it might not be an option.

Suffice it to say, I'm not at ALL surprised to hear of how miserably the SA + SA Box Trapper system is working. I had the exact same problem.

Bailey

1. Add captcha to all your forms. I'm in the process of doing this and it cut down on my form spam by 96%. (And there wasn't much there before.) I installed it on this board, just to give you an example.

2. Do use a challenge-based system like SpamArrest. But don't use it with forms, or with newsletter subscriptions. (As a newsletter publisher, I ignore all the challenge emails I get back from mailing my list. It's bloody ridiculous.)

3. Ties in with #3. All your domains should go to a helpdesk instead, and have all your personal email to one addy only. (I do this as many other marketers do. I use gmail as my email that's personal, straight to me. All my other emails get filtered via my helpdesk, which my assistant wades through and answers, filters, follows up with, deletes, etc.

There's Kayako.com, Cerberus.com, one by James Brausch I believe and many more -- some you can download and install yourself. I, of one, have my wife's company, Workaholics4hire.com, handle all my customer support and email. The time it saved me -- and the little expense (remember, I was a client before I married her) -- is enormous. I have more free time to be more productive to grow my business, rather than managing it (including spam).

I wonder how the Gmails and Yahoos do it. Every piece of spam I get always goes (correctly) into the junk folder, and all others go to my inbox.

Then there are other freebie emails like Microsoft's that just plain suck at spam filtering. At least that's been my experience in the past.

Only free one I use now is Gmail.

Gmail's spam-filtering is pretty good.

They use a variety of factors to "judge" whether an email is spam or not. It's
not perfect because I've had very few legitimate emails caught, but at least
they're killing a large majority of spam.

Andre, if you really have evidence someone in the US is spamming you, we've
got Mike Young here.

Hi Bailey

I'm definitely interested in knowing how to kill spammers.. er... I mean spam

My domain is remotely hosted. I paid a reseller for hosting. The server information box shows cPanel Build 10.9.0-RELEASE 34. No clue if that means it's uptodate or outdated.

In my mail options I have SpamAssassin, BoxTrapper Spam Trap, and email filtering. I've used all three.

SpamAssassin and Box trapper worked great back when I listed one of my email aliases directly on my web page, but some senders were (sorry to say) too stupid to figure out they needed to click a link in the reply email to confirm their identity. These are small business owners I'm talking about. Not some little kid.

After the third biz person sent me frustrated email through my contact form saying they can't reach me by email I figured it was time to stop using a challenge/response system.

I really like Michel's idea of freeing up time by outsourcing for someone else to clean my emails for me. My one concern would be trust they aren't stealing my info or deleting important stuff. Just thought of something. That another way spam actually costs people money -- outsourcing that task ain't free. It's so lame the law not made it completely illegal to spam and trade/distribute email addresses without permission.

Andre