Silly spam

[alitalf]

I just saw a spam titled "stop wasting your time in despair".

One of the main sources of despair is the large quantity of spam I have to delete. The ISP has spam filtering that works fairly well, but it is not quite good enough. Nearly all the spam is diverted to a spam mailbox that I can access on-line - so far so good. Of the email I download, there is often more real mail than spam, which is pretty good since there are 1000 spams per day routinely and more in a heavy spam surge.

The problem is that if I leave the spam for over about half a day it is increasingly difficult to delete. The choices are to display 15 message headers at a time, or to display all. If I select all and hit the delete button, then if there are more than about 500 spams it is very likely that there will be an error message saying that the IMAP server dropped the connection, and I will find that no spam was deleted.

A help request to the ISP got me the answer that, for such a large amount of spam, I  might be better to use local filtering tools. <sigh> How does that help save bandwidth?

Comments

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

The spam automatically gets deleted after seven days. Don't waste your time with it.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

I think we are discussing different ISPs. This problem is on my own ISP where the spam filtering is quite different and les configurable than that on the TS hosting provider.

I am beginning to think I need a different hosting provider, but time and energy does not permit any time soon.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Ah, right. I thought you were talking about the TS having recently done spam stuff there.

I'd recommend either Demon or Zen.

[estiel.livejournal.com]

Golly, Altialf. What a lot of spam. I don't have any. Been meaning to ask you: I have free AVG virus protection. They have a new version 8.0 which I'm admonished daily to purchase. It's $54.95 for the first year! I wasn't going to do it, but now they say that auto updates to the earlier version will be discontinued after 31 May. Recommendation?

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

On the antivirus, I would (I do) use Eset security, which includes a firewall and antivirus, but slows the computer less than either a firewall or an antivirus on its own from most other suppliers.

You have to pay for it, but it seems to be good. I chose it after looking for a good security solution at a computer show last year. FWIW I think I still havfe a reseller account for eset, so may be able to arrange for you to pay less than retail price for it. Ask me if you would like to do that.

The spam we receive arrives on several domains: wisca.co.uk, aaelectron.co.uk, aaelectron.com, and tolkeinsociety.org

It is an awful lot, though, and I wish there were less. Apparently over 95% of all email is spam, however. Someone has to receive this rubbish.

[estiel.livejournal.com]

My neighbor's son-in-law, a computer person (don't know exactly what kind) just talked me through updating the AVG without having to buy the version they're selling. He said 8.0 was available for free from the website, and yes, it was. So--problem solved--I guess/hope.