Ask Slashdot: How Effective Is Your ISP's Spam Filter? 269
An anonymous reader writes with the question in the title: does your ISP do a decent job culling spam? The reason I'm asking is that my ISP is Verizon and the Verizon spam filter is next to useless. It only blocks 15% of spam while also blocking 5% of legitimate emails. I've tried calling Verizon support a couple of times and the experience is about as pleasant and productive as banging my head on a wall. At this point I think my best move is to change ISP, but before I go around changing my email address at probably dozens of web sites I'd like to be sure that a new ISP would actually be better.
Why use ISP email? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhmmm, why are you using your ISP's email in the first place? It's far better to use a third party email provider, so that you can switch ISPs at will without having to change your email address.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:5, Informative)
THIS
There's no reason to use the email provided to you by your ISP. It's just another way to keep you locked into their services. Once upon a time, before web mail, and easily available domain names and hosting services, it made more sense to just use whatever your ISP gave you. But there is absolutely no reason to use it now, and it can actually cause a lot of problems as the OP has pointed out. Personally, I wouldn't recommend using a 3rd party Email provider at all. I would just buy my own domain name and figure out my own hosting solution for the email. Even if you just forward the email to GMail (This is what I do), you own the email address, and you don't have to worry about what happens when you want to switch the interfrace, and end up having to change your email address in the process. Many sites use your email address as your login, assuming that nobody would ever want to change their email address. Sure, GMail may be nice now, but they've shut down services in the path. I ended up switching email addresses a couple times when email services decided to close up, or just start offering really bad service. I don't ever want to have to switch email addresses again.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:5, Insightful)
I highly doubt gmail is going anywhere soon. Next to search, it's their most profitable business. It would almost be like saying "Google search may not be around much longer."
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.
There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think the OP is suggesting gmail is going anywhere soon. I think he is suggesting that they may not be round in the (not soon) future.
There was a time when AOL wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe they still aren't, but that claim is straining credulity. At the very least, being stuck with an AOL email address in 2015 is not an ideal situation to be in. Is it really so hard to imagine that one might not want to be stuck with a gmail email address in 2035?
I pay for my own domain and external hosting. It has Spam Assassin on it and gets about 40% of the spam. I have GMail configured to pull in my email from that account. GMail's spam filter gets the other 59% of spam. I set up Gmail to send as my personal email address instead of my gmail address. This way I have my own domain and I get to take advantage of Gmail's spam filter.
The one thing that sucks about the set-up is that Gmail has a randomized timer that polls external accounts based on some algorithm and it can sometimes take 30 minutes for email to show up. To get around this I set up both accounts on most of my devices so that I can check my email server if the message isn't in Gmail.
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Since when is google an ISP?
Since when do we not think about the longevity and potential disruption from service terminations for companies other than ISPs?
It is entirely possible, and rather likely I think, that gmail will see changes, even if in just the TOS, that people decide they do not like and thus have reason to leave.
And oh yes we should use wild unreasonable predictions of the future to guide our present actions!!! What a great idea!!! Maybe we should dig our graves now to avoid inconveniencing our heirs.
"Planning ahead" is something that mature adults tend to do. They tend to buy life insurance to deal with "wild unreasonable predictions" about the future and to care for their family. They put money in the ba
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I'm not sure why you inferred that I thought google was an ISP.
I don't think the prediction that gmail may not be your preferred email service for all eternity counts as being "wild unreasonable".
Making good decisions based on good predictions of the future is part of what makes us successful as individuals and as a species. It's called investing.
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WebCrawler may not be around much longer.
AltaVista may not be around much longer.
GeoCities may not be around much longer.
Myspace may not be around much longer.
No company or service is eternal. Gmail will cease to exists one day, the question is "when?"
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You don't even have to host the email, I got a domain for a small company and let 1&1 look after the email for peanuts - without all of the maintenance drag. If 1&1 go down then there are multiple options for continuing the email.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Interesting)
A cheap VPS plus a domain name would also be more than adequate for hosting your own email, or even a low power ARM based machine running at home on the end of your DSL assuming you have a static ip and an ISP that doesn't filter SMTP traffic.
As for spam filtering, a filter that's dedicted to you will usually be more effective too as it can learn about the email *You* typically receive... A lot of spam is sent around in languages like russian and chinese, but if you can't read these languages then chances are you will never receive any legitimate email written in these languages... A major email provider cannot block entire languages because they might have customers who speak those languages, but a mail server dedicated to one person can easily and reasonably do so.
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For the technically savvy, sure. For the average everday user, this option is right out.
This is what I used to. Unfortunately, keeping my spam filters up to date ended up being a pretty major chore. Even with blocking everything but english, I still spent more time than I wanted training the filters what was spam and wasn't.
So I started to think about how to fix this. Then I realized that my gmail account rarely, rarely gets spam.
So I setup Google Apps for Work and moved my domain email hosting over to that
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And actually, I should say this -
By switching over to Google Apps, I actually saved money. I was paying Linode 10 bucks a month for a VPS. I pay Google 8.33 a month for 2 users (me and my wife), so I ended up saving money and time with the change over. It was a no brainer
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I would just buy my own domain name and figure out my own hosting solution for the email
Sounds like a great way to make sure you get your mail blocked all over the place because they don't recognize the domain name. Also hosted where exactly? Pay someone to do it? Or run it out of your house (which requires internet connectivity that allows you to run a server)? Sounds expensive, most people are not going to be willing to pay all the extra money just for email.
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Been doing it for 15 years. Never had a problem.
Gmail Is Not The Solution (Score:2)
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I’d been routing all my personal domain email through GMail for years to take advantage of their excellent spam filters, but it turns out that GMail was occasionally rejecting some of this mail for looking spammy and somehow I was never getting notified that this was happening! Like, it wasn't going into GMail's Spam folder: it just was never being sent to me at all. Browsing my inbox on my personal domain's webmail revealed a bunch of emails I'd just never received. This had been going on for years b
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some years back, I used a small, local ISP. I once got an email from them including an attachment (.exe). Being on a linux box, I opened it, to find it was malware (and the message was SPAM -- someone had cracked their servers).
Do not use an ISP's email and don't even correspond with them. Pay them for their bits and be done with them.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting a malware attachment by email has NOTHING AT ALL to do with their server. If someone had hacked their server and was doing it, then fine... but the two issues do not go hand in hand in any way.
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There's every need if the mail originated from the ISP. The OP said nothing about from address - the hops recorded in the headers may have been an indication. They're something I regularly check when I get spam sent to an account where the address is rarely used.
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The from: was correct. The .exe was a known trojan, and SPAM was the vector; IIRC it was an early form of SQL injection using a known MS bug. The admin I spoke to on the phone first didn't even know his site had been compromised. Me: "Did xxxx send me a trojan in an email?" Them: "I don't know, let me check..."; later conversations with management indicated this spam trojan was sent to all their active customers.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely. The two important questions here are why use an ISP's email and why use Verizon? While it would be wrong to talk someone out of dumping Verizon for any reason, no matter who you use for an ISP it is nice to have a better email service and not be dependent on your ISP for email. As this post indicates, you are hesitating to dump your ISP because of the hassle of changing an email address that all of your contacts already have. If you were using a third party email then you could change your ISP provider whenever needed without having to change anything with email.
And in addition to getting a real email account that is free of any ISP, I could also suggest that you use a free forwarding service such as spamgourmet.com. That will let you give out a unique email address to every commercial contact that insists on an email address and even to each of your friends. When spam hits you can just close down the targeted forwarding service addresses rather than abandoning the entire main address, and you can easily see which organization that you gave an email address to is sharing or leaking your information to Russian Porn Spammers and pill pushers. Knowing who leaked your email can be surprising and extremely helpful.
Even giving a unique email address to each friend is a good idea. That way if one of them clicks on something stupid ad exposed their entire address book to spammers, the spammers only get an address that you can disable, not your real email address. And if you decide that you want to change email providers, you are free to do so without the hassle of notifying everyone about the email change, you just need to update your record at the forwarding service.
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I think it all depends on whether you are the kind of person that requires human technical support or not. A lot of people do.
Re:Why use ISP email? (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on the ISP, don't you think? I work for an ISP that sells e-mail as a separate service. If you're in the service area of a suitable provider, then you can buy e-mail service without subscribing to any network connection service, anyways, so it doesn't matter if you switch ISPs.
We're not "giving e-mail service away"; we are not Gmail. If you want a free/gratis mail service with all their disadvantages (and advantages) such as larger attachments and more theoretically allowed disk space with the disadvantages of lack of professional on-call management and no phone number to call which a competent human will answer, or no option for hands-on assistance from a human being if something major goes wrong with your service or account, or you get stuck, then go over there to one of the major search engines for free webmail by all means.
E-mail is a complex application which is totally separate from network connectivity and requires application-specific management for reliable operation. Why should the two services ever be treated as if they were part of the same? They're totally different services.
If reliable e-mail access and delivery is of the umpost importance to you, then you should self-host, or use a paid account with an ISP or hosting provider. Because it's definitely a better idea than using a free Hotmail account.
There is also a totally different set of skills and experience required from professionals implementing and maintaining e-mail systems, from maintaining a network.
There's no reason you should not be able to switch ISPs but keep your e-mail and DNS hosting, if you want.
Of course you still have to pay the hosting bill to some provider, and it's probably somewhere between $120 and $150 per mailbox. If you purchased your own domain name and hosted e-mail under that domain, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to take e-mail service to any willing host.
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especialy people here that have enough knowledge on doing what is needed.
The ./ demographic has shifted drastically over the last 10 years.
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Personally, I'm looking forward to my work changing domains. We're loosing the hp.com and going to hpe.com...right now I have a VERY common four letter word @hp.com, which also happens to be the old email of some Director of HR...so I get tons
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Strider's entirely correct here...although I don't think this actually counts as "Insightful", more a "statement of the bleedin' obvious"
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I have my own domains, but they're forwarded to my ISP's email service. Result is the same. I can switch ISPs without changing my email address. Although I would have to change the forwarding. As for my ISP's spam filter: It's overzealous, so I turned it off. It should be off unless BT have decided to turn it on again behind my back.
For those that are interested: I use disposable email addresses and I don't get enough spam to need a spam filter. When I do get spam, the unsubscribe links work. The only excep
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what about the free email address your college gave you when you graduated? why aren't you using it?
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That's great unless, for anyone of a number of reasons, you don't want to be thatgeek@college.edu for the rest of your life.
What free e-mail address? My university canned all my accounts several years after I finally got around to graduating. That's a lot of overhead for them to have to deal with I wouldn't expect that to live forever.
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Did you mean to submit this to SlashDot? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> my ISP is Verizon and the Verizon spam filter
Not too many people 'round here are dumb enough to use their ISP as their email provider. Fix that problem first. (Closes ticket.)
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Rule #1 (Score:3, Informative)
Don't tie your email account to your ISP. Decide how you are going to get your email independently, then your ISP is just the pipe.
Two benefits:
- You can change your pipe without causing problems- your email address doesn't change
- You have a lot more options for email providers than most people have options for ISPs.
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Rule #2: ?
Rule #3: Profit.
Spam filter? (Score:3)
I didn't even know my ISP had a spam filter. I have spam filters on my accounts and the junk folder fills up constantly. In fact, my ISP is one of the worst spam offenders, sending me constant offers for great deals if I just sign up for their cable TV and other "special deals".
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The last time I used an ISP email, it surely didn't have a spam filter. Or, if it did, it filtered everything but the spam.
No filter is truly effective (Score:5, Insightful)
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
You cannot win with filters, period.
The truth of the matter - that a lot of people seem to either not be aware of or not be concerned with - is that spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send out spam to piss you off, they send it out to make money. No amount of filtering or criminal prosecution will change that; in fact it generally just increases the total volume of spam that traverses the internet continuously. We all pay for this spam to be transmitted, stored, processed, downloaded, etc, even if we never buy any spamvertised product. We pay for it in that it increases the consumption of internet bandwidth, it increases the consumption of storage at ISPs, and has other downstream impacts as well
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else - not even the sum total of all the filters ever installed worldwide - has had an impact even remotely near it.
Stop thinking about filters an start thinking about solutions.
No filter is perfect but many are very effective (Score:5, Informative)
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
Disagree. I have used gmail for quite a while and I very rarely see spam outside of the spam folder. This has been the case for many years now. I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore. When one does slip through I just flag it and the problem goes away. Spam effectively almost doesn't exist for me. While I do agree that no filter is perfect it isn't that hard to have one that is highly effective. With enough people flagging spam filters can be very useful in automating spam removal. It doesn't entirely solve the problem but it has made it manageable.
You cannot win with filters, period.
I have no illusions that I am going to eliminate spam entirely. The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem. So far nobody has come up with a credible and effective solution and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it. At that point you have to pay your ISP to accept it, analyze it, tag it, and store it. Sure, they do it all at such high volumes that the cost is
All we have are imperfect technical solutions (Score:2)
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands. It's good enough that I really don't feel the need to bother checking.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process. You aren't going to eliminate spam but you can minimize the economic impact of it.
In any case the notion that you are somehow going to get greedy a-holes to stop se
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If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands.
From a statistical standpoint it does not. You cannot make a statement about your false positive rate if you do nothing to evaluate it. It is like saying you don't crush any ants under your shoes on your walk in to work, made without ever looking at the sidewalk or your shoes.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process.
It doesn't matter which ISP you want to process it, you will end up paying for it regardless. Furthermore as most spam is distributed across a large number of (often compromised) mail servers anyways, it wouldn't be that useful fo
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You cannot win with filters, period.
If by "win" you mean perfection then no of course not. If on the other hand you mean "making it useable by get rid of the majority of the junk" then yeah filtering works fine.
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Spammers don't send out spam to piss you off, they send it out to make money. No amount of filtering or criminal prosecution will change that; in fact it generally just increases the total volume of spam that traverses the internet continuously.
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else - not even the sum total of all the filters ever installed worldwide - has had an impact even remotely near it.
Stop thinking about filters an start thinking about solutions.
Since you dismissed the two (IMHO) best ways to keep spammers away from the money, let's hear your solutions instead of lecturing and challenging others.
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Since you dismissed the two (IMHO) best ways to keep spammers away from the money, let's hear your solutions instead of lecturing and challenging others.
I dismissed filters, and filters only, because they are ineffective. I endorse interrupting the flow of money to the spammers. There are multiple ways to do this, one particularly good way is to go through the credit card industry to flag the transactions and have them refuse payment - this was used effectively by a group at Georgia Tech several years ago and caused a couple smaller spamming operations to shrivel up promptly.
Other approaches can include going after the registrars (hence my slashdot u
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Spammers will find other ways to host their sites, like compromised boxes...
Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
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Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
Which is why - as I said before - you interrupt the flow of money instead. There is a lag between the sucker entering their CC info on a crappy website and hitting "buy' and the spammers receiving their compensation for bringing suckers to the spamvertised domain. In fact, there are at least three transactions along the way:
Any one
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They may be about money, but let us be clear that they aren't legitimate companies making money, they are about fraud.
Today, most spam is malware or scams. It's not like 10 years ago when it was businesses paying for "direct mailing." Looking at several people's spam filters, most of it purports to come from Walmart, Amazon, iTunes, Overstock.com, ... These are legit companies who are not sending me free $50 gift coupons every day. The rest are offering stock tips, "adult" services, diplomas, antivirus,
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They may be about money, but let us be clear that they aren't legitimate companies making money, they are about fraud.
That depends on how you define "legitimate companies". I agree that they are generally not legitimate - particularly by first-world standards - but they are often established operations with leaders and business plans. They consider themselves to be legitimate, even if they are involved in activities that they know are illegal in some places.
Looking at several people's spam filters, most of it purports to come from Walmart, Amazon, iTunes, Overstock.com, ... These are legit companies who are not sending me free $50 gift coupons every day
They are still spamvertising for someone. The spammers are still getting paid by whoever their spam directs people to. It doesn't matter if the target site is sel
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If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam). The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter, is a good sign that spammers are losing this battle.
It seems that in 2015 it is far more profitable to sell products through means other than spam (e.g. google advertisements, etc).
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If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam).
The main problem with that notion is that the people most likely to pay for a filter are the ones least likely to buy anything as a result of spam anyways. Hence you are not preventing the spammers from reaching their customers.
The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter
You are ignoring the volume of spam that traverses the internet at any given moment in time. The volume is UP, not down. Just because a lot of it doesn't reach human eyes doesn't mean there is less of it. In fact, ISPs and email providers are inundated with spam traffic more no
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I agree with you that the fundamental problem is economics and the fact that there is incentive to spam.. however, I've had the same email address for 15 years and have had good luck with rbls, razor/pyzor, and spamassassin.
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If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else
Sending them to PMITA prison would also be effective.
Wrong. That has been tried before. In fact one of the world's all-time top spammers is sitting in a prison in Russia (Leo Kuvayev, aka "BadCow", aka "Alex Rodrigez" [spamhaus.org]) (on kiddie porn and child abuse, not spamming, charges) right now and it did not move the needle on spam volume.
As would feeding them into a woodchipper.
Don't be stupid. Just because it makes you feel better doesn't mean it helps the problem. I'm surprised you posted AC, though, as murdering spammers is generally a very popular proposal here on slashdot.
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While the Office Space and Fargo methods would probably work, I think Hanover Fiste of Heavy Metal has the right idea:
Spammers are nothing but low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worms! Hanging's too good for them. Burning's too good for them! They should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!
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Google (Score:4, Informative)
I use both Gmail and Google Apps for my own domain email and their spam filtering is very good.
Re: Google (Score:4, Informative)
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I doubt there is any filter anywhere that won't have an occasional false positive. I have had a couple. Also occasionally a spam will sneak through. That said, I use a catch-all on my domain so I get a huge amount of spam. I'm continuously impressed that it picks out my mere dozens of legit emails from the 5-10 thousand spams I get every month.
I have run my own mail server in the past. I doubt I could do any better.
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I'm pretty sure the only thing they drop is mail with infected attachments. Everything else they think is junk gets sent to the spam folder.
I mean hell, I had more problems with false positives from Outlook marking crap as junk than I ever did from Google, until I decided to just turn off the Outlook junk filtering and trust Google instead
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Joe Jobs can happen to anyone no matter who their provider or domain is.
Your ISP doesn't care (Score:5, Insightful)
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In the immortal words of Ernestine the telephone operator, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company!"
And in this case, it's very true. Verizon, formerly GTE, was the second largest phone company in the US during the Ma Bell era.
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Run your own server? You got to be kidding with advice like this. It is simple enough to get such a server up and operational. But, the maintenance effort needed on that server quickly outweighs any benefits. Ensuring the server has appropriate spam / virus protections, keeping these up to date, dealing with blacklistings, etc. It just is not worth it unless it is your job to maintain a server like this. If this is NOT your job, that job will suffer due to less time being available while you deal with
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Along the same line of thinking: Don't use Google either. They're quickly becoming a bigger monster than Microsoft ever was.
Tell us more about how monster corporations are more likely to snoop into your email than smaller ones. And go ahead and try to provide proof.
Very effective, but.. (Score:2)
With the increasing growth of outsource email, it's getting really hard for spam detectors to distinguish between real spam, and email sent on behalf of one company by some outsourced mail/customer contact management company.
Here's the technology my ISP uses: http://www.escom.com/ [escom.com] (Disclosure: The developer is a friend-of-a-friend of long standing.)
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It's too bad no one has come up with a way for companies to denote what mail servers are legitimate senders on behalf of their domains...
All sarcasm aside, SPF records are easy to configure. If you (and by "you" I mean anyone reading this. I'm not directing this comment at the parent poster.) are responsible in any way for managing email for an organization, make sure the domain's SPF records are configured. Chances are your email or DNS service provider has an easy to use tool for writing the TXT record
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The mail hosting companies are particularly delinquent in not making damn sure this is done for every "mom-and-pop.com" they host. If you're not a tech person, but run a small business doing something else, the ins and outs of this kind of thing is what you -should be getting- from an outsource mail service.
ISP Mail is for chumps.... (Score:3)
When I operated an ISP we had an absurdly effective mail filtering system. 2000 users in the domain, on average 1,000,000 spam messages blocked per day (the owner had sold the customer mail list several times (somuchate)). This required LOTS of work and honestly wasn't worth the effort.
I've had a GMail acct since 2004, haven't had an issue since. Left that ISP job, been through 2 other ISPs since then. Haven't had to change anything about external accounts, still have mail archival going back over a decade now and very few spam messages get through, very few legit emails blocked.
Spamassassin and Greylisting.. (Score:4, Informative)
I've also got very little spam on my Gmail address as well..
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There's a reason that SpamAssassin is a core component to so many commercial spam filters.
I've been using Gmail for years, and have it popping my mail from a couple of other accounts, or setting them to forward it. For email sent directly to my Gmail address, their spam filtering seems pretty good, but for forwarded or popped email, they get way too many false positives. Their filtering sees the IP address the mail is being popped or forwarded from as the "connecting address" for SPF, DKIM, etc., testing.
Number of comments is really down (Score:3, Insightful)
Boy, the number of comments has really fallen on all stories since Dice's last "upgrade."
Very Effective - but it's not my ISP (Score:2, Informative)
My spam filters are very effective, but they're not on my ISP's servers. My email comes in through my own custom domain name sitting on an 'Nix Apache CPanel shared web host that I rent space on. I get to setup. This is very effective. Then my MacOSX Mail App does the next level of filtering. I have each level set for whitelists, blacklists, keywords so that there is very little in the way of false positives and only about 0.1% to 0.001% of spam is getting through (I have stats). There are surges where it r
It sucks. (Score:2)
Comcasts Spam filter is crap, but who in the world uses their ISP email? Gmail and call it done so you can change ISP without disruption to email.
They are all useless, aren't they? (Score:2)
I use gmail, and it frequently sends my forum registrations and password reminders to the spam folder, and delivers actual spam to me, then offers to send it an unsubscribe notice to let it know that my address is valid.
Why? (Score:3)
Like everybody else is saying -- Why are you using your ISP's email? They should only be your pipe. I personally stopped using any ISP's email in the 90's... It was after the first switch over that I figured this problem out.
Originally I ran my own domain and spam filtering. I was on the first batch of first spam from those lawyers. Fuckers. Anyway...
Have since migrated domain email to Google apps -- not free anymore for you unfortunately, but on a user @gmail.com basis is still very free.
For speed Google wins -- never even came close to matching their speed for users with gigs and gigs of email they refuse to delete. Not that I'm one to talk.
Their spam filtering beats anything I've seen. I always had too many false positives on my setup; Google has really had one problem in the last decade with that -- false positives from the COPIERS (they have their own accounts and in the domain mailing to same domain users). Annoyingly I had to add a filter to each user to fix that problem.
Otherwise their spam filters are dead nuts on for me. One, maybe two spam messages will hit my Inbox in any given year. My account will @ the .com variant of the domain will get 2-5,000 spams a DAY...
Use Google.
I just ignore my ISP's email service (Score:2)
Why tie your email to your ISP? I ignore my ISP's email service except for email from them about my account. If I were you I'd set up an email account with another service and use that as my primary email. That way when I change ISPs (and I will, whether because I moved or because I got fed up with crappy Internet service) I don't have to worry about changing my email address everywhere. In fact it might not hurt to have accounts at more than one email service, so you have an established backup in case it's
Better than Gmail spam filter (Score:2)
I use both ISP e-mail and Gmail over IMAP with a proper e-mail client The ISP Spam filter works extremely well, always has, which is one reason I still use it. For years when someone has mentioned spam, I often said: "what is this spam thing you speak of?" For those who decry using ISP e-mail as a trap to keep you subscribed. Well perhaps, but since that ISP has had the fastest speeds and better service than any other local provide, I'm not worried that much. They did drop USENET though.
Gmail's filter
I'd say visi.com (Yes, 3rd party, NOT MSN) is good (Score:2)
I only route their daily digest to a folder because maybe every YEAR OR TWO I check for a false positive that may or may not be there.
What gets through is always a question. If you've purchased from a company and might do so again, are their weekly, biweekly or daily ads spam? I have an extensive local filter so most ads go to an "ads" folder for more frequent removal and pure spam gets added infrequently as needed.
Gmail (Score:2)
Just use Gmail. The SPAM filter there is quite good. Yes, on occasion something gets through when they haven't learned it yet. Yes, on rare occasions something gets put into Spam that shouldn't (so just check your spam folder every week or so). But overall I can't complain
My ISP? Verizon, really bad (Score:2)
Verizon FIOS (aka Verizon broad band) has what they call "SPAM Filters" but they are pretty much worthless. It used to be pretty good, but they have apparently not managed the filters for a few years and now they are really not effective at all. It is so bad that I'm almost wondering if they actually HAVE a filter anymore, or is it just a check box on the web screen they put there to keep people from complaining....
I've been seriously considering buying a domain and setting up my own server just so I can
ISP based email? In 2015? (Score:2)
I honestly can't remember when I last used my ISP's email address, but I think it was in the 90's.
Why are you using it? There's not a single good reason I can think of.
Great! (Score:2)
That's still much better than my ISP.
Signed,
a Canadian.
Re: (Score:2)
Canadian, you're probably with Bell or Rogers. Yes, they suck. Try Teksavvy. They're actually pleasant to deal with.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Teksavvy employee or shareholder, but I am a very satisfied Teksavvy customer.
Strongly discouraged... (Score:2)
I strongly discourage any friends or family that I notice are using local ISP email accounts from doing it. I wouldn't trust it to keep the good email. LOL, for a while, our local cable co was spam binning their OWN newsletter. I do a lot of work with an opt-in email newsletter, so I've monitored a test email box with the cable company for years - it's bad, bad, bad. Coincidentally, they've recently changed something, and now a lot of spam emails don't even hit the junk folder, they simply vanish.
opportunity to plug my GPL'ed email server (Score:2)
Ditto all the stuff about not using your ISPs email server.
Personally, I'd experienced a declining state of affairs in email hosting at a price that I thought was reasonable. I eventually got to the point where I hacked together my own (receiving only) email server in Python. (Also using pieces from Django to connect to an SQL backend.) My outgoing email is sent via a cheap hosting package I have that also doubles as a backup if I have a major incoming server problem... I can just point my MX records b
Yahoo spam filter works well (Score:3)
Random Thoughts... (Score:2)
I don't know what platform you use but if it's Windows just use the mail client of your choice and something like ESet Smart Security which includes a really good spam filter; I have any number of customers using it and they are all very satisfied.
As far as customer service goes, I've deal with Comcast and Verizon many many times and it's always the same. The person you're talking to seems to have no idea how to address your problem; they put you on hold multiple times while they apparently run around looki
Why are you here if you cant setup a VM (Score:2)
Spend a couple bucks grab a VM buy a domain name for 10 bucks. Use google or MS if ya realy need to.
my ISP dont filter it (Score:2)
Do you really want (Score:2)
GMail (Score:2)
Create a GMail account and POP from your ISP's crappy system.
GMail's SPAM filter is not perfect, but it's very easy to live with.
ISP email is pretty crappy.
ISPs have no incentive (Score:2)
ISPs have no incentive to offer spam filtering, and indeed very little incentive to even give out email addresses. Email is a huge PITA and there are plenty of free providers to choose from : Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and probably dozens of lesser-known ones.
Also, ISPs have a pretty small profit margin on consumer service, so any costs they can cut, they will cut. So don't bother with an ISP email account.
Re: (Score:2)
IIRC, mine was Time Warner, and it was just as bad! I don't think gmail existed yet. That's probably when I switched to yahoo, and it was better than TW.
Re: (Score:2)
and so dose
microsoft and yahoo and "fill in the blank"
they ALL!!!!!!! do for selling advertising
BUT it takes the nsa or gchq or any other Org to REALLY read the mail
Re: (Score:2)
Run your own MTA, problem solved.
Yeah, you'll never get ANY mail if you're not on the white lists. Problem solved!
Re: (Score:2)
I've been running my own MTA for 15 years. Not on any whitelists. No problems.
Re: (Score:2)
This. Switch to something other than your ISP. Anything other than your ISP. If you want to go free, GMail is probably the best one out there, but if you're willing to go for-pay (and you really should!), consider this my +1 for FastMail.
FastMail has done a great job of growing with me as my needs have changed. I switched from GMail about a year ago, and I was up and running with all of my contacts, archived mail, and my new e-mail addresses within a few hours of starting my trial (and most of that time was