blocking spam email and backing up data online?

[Matt Seigneur]

Tweet

hi there!

1. i keep getting spam emails (it's getting too silly now!) and wondered if any of you use any software to keep it under control?

2. also, my laptop hasn't a cd-writer so wondering if there's any reliable and very secure places i can upload backups of stuff to?

[Mogga]

use spamassassin on your email server?
or mailwasher which sorts mail on your pc.

Connect your laptop to something which does have a cd writer or get an external one?

[Ste]

Once your email address starts getting spammed, the best way is to delete the email account, get another and then use email aliases to direct all emails to your new original email address.

If you are getting loads thru, you are, no doubt on one of the email CD's with millions of others which are floating around.

[Matt Seigneur]

thanks mogga and Ste I'll give spamassassin a try.

I can't connect anything to the laptop as usb don't/won't/can't work!!

[smn2]

Hi

I now forward all email addresses for most new sites I
create to a free Lycos account. And I check
my Lycos account a couple of times per day, and quickly
scan for any real messages (of which there should be none!).
This means that link-swap requests that get sent to
webmaster@ also get forwarded to this spam-email account

(I like to think that genuine link-swap requests are from
people who bother to visit the site and find out what
the email address of my site is.)

In most cases, now, I set up a website-name@master-site-name
email address for all of my sites (create an image of this,
so I have no mailto links on my site) - e.g.
shopping at mymainsite.com - and use a so-called anti-spam
feedback form; i.e. one that doesn't refer to an email
address on the web page.

So I do get quite a bit of spam, but very little hits my
main email client (Outlook).

Ya gotta keep those mailto's off your site, simple as that.

This might not help Matt, who has the somewhat painful
process of deleting an email address and changing over
to another one, but it should help others yet to be
blighted by spam.

Cheers,
Steve

[admad1]

The way to deal with this is to ensure your reseller account or host provider allows you to send all mail to :blackhole: Basically this sends all email not addressed to a default address you specify to the ether. This is what I do.

All mail goes to blackhole which is the default email address.

Use a PHP script that uses an external file to forward mail to an email address you have desginated.

Only mail addressed to the desginated address is recieved

All other mail anyname@yourmail address.com goes to blackhole.

The only mail I recive is from the forms on my website. Mail crawlers cant grab the email address as it's in an external php file.


You can implement this on domains already active if you wish as long as your host has control panel set-up to allow you to do so.

If you want a copy of the PHP script pm me

Oops almost forgot , any decent host should allow you to backup your whole site including mysql databases via your control panel. My reseller account allows me to create a zip file and download to my PC as well as keep a copy on the server, restores are done in the same way.


get a copy of thunderbird (mozilla.org )as use for your email client. This has an excellent junk mail filter, simply select multiple emails right click and mark as junk once you've set the option to delete all junk mail on selection it's gone every time you recive mail that Thunderbird assumes is junk or that you have previoulsy marked as junk it goes stratight down the chute.



Kili