How to obtain blacklists, spam?

[robFSS]

Howdy -

It's my understanding that there's a decent number of organizations with

http://WWW presence

that generate blacklists of spammers' email addresses. I see that exchange and my antivirus/antispam products have features that will allow me to import these list.

How do I obtain these lists?
Any recommendations?
Any warnings?
Am I on-track with my assumptions here?

thanks,
r

 

[2ffat]

Here are two sites that might help:

http://www.spamhaus.org

&

http://www.spamcop.net

James P. Cottingham
-----------------------------------------
[sup]I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229![/sup]

 

[jet042]

One caveat I have, remember that black-lists are only as good as their ability to be quickly updated. I know that a lot of them also now use heuristics in an attempt to catch new addresses and types of spam, but you can not reasonably expect that a black-list of any kind will catch everything. This is a weakness of the "default permit" attitude that communication over the internet started with and still exists under.

An alternative (that may or may not be feasible for you depending on what kinds of e-mail you get) would be to switch to a "default deny" stance and create a white-list of good addresses instead. Anything that comes in that is not on your white-list gets shunted to a "Junk" folder for further review. This requires a lot more interaction on your part, but is fundamentally more secure.

 

[lhuegele]

You can also outsource this to a 3rd party, such as Postini.

 

[robFSS]

lhuegele -

i have postini.

I'm really disappointed by its performance.

I activated it recently, and over the course of a few days, I cranked up the filtering to the MAX.

I'm still getting dozens of spam messages daily.

 

[lhuegele]

orlotron - no anti-spam solution is going to catch 100% of the inbound spam. What you have to look at is the percentage of the total that is getting through. For my company, Postini has been great. Each user gets a weekly digest email listing all the messages that were blocked with links to easily deliver any false positives. For me, the best solution is one with the least amount of false positives. So far, I have had NO false positives with Postini, and it's still blocking greater than 98% of the spam for me. I can live with 2% of the spam making it through, especially when there are no false positives.

So when you say dozens are getting through daily, what percentage is that of the total number of daily spams? If you are getting 100 spams a day and only 10 are making it through, that's a 90% reduction in the amount of spam getting to your inbox, and that's very good, especially if the number of false positives is very low.

Good luck.

 

[robFSS]

lhuegele -

at this point I am seriously considering ditching my current email address and starting anew.

I'd say postini catches less than 10% of the spam I get daily. In truth, my address alone receives easily over 100 spam messages daily.

My Monday morning inbox cleanout ritual is the pits.

 

[confusedlady]

orlotron, have you tried using Mozilla's Thunderbird as your e-mail app? I forward e-mail from my server to a gmail account (take advantage of their filters also), and then have Thunderbird get the e-mail from gmail, not my actual e-mail address. Thunderbird "remembers" your junk mail, so you can kind of "train" it to pick up a lot of junk.

Just thought it's worth a try before ditching your address altogether. It cut out a lot of my spam.

 

[smah]

I have pretty good luck with Postini, but I'm more pleased with MXLogic.

 

[robFSS]

smah - I'll check out MXLogic, postini doesn't really do it for me.

confusedlady I'm trying to process your thunderbird suggestion. I've used it a little at home, but I'm not sure it's a good choice for use at work. Does it really have the same MS Office integration capabilities as Outlook?

As an update to my initial situation -

I reinstalled windows and outlook on a fresh HDD since initially posting this thread.

while my spam volume is still pretty intense, I've noticed that Outlook's junk mail folder has really stepped up and made my inbox a lot more manageable.

I'm not sure why it's working any differently than it did on my old computer, but it does. I get easily over 100 spam messages a day, and the junk filter catches the majority of them. I still skim it each day as it occasionally pick up a false positive, but for the most part, I can dump the whole folder contents in the garbage.

 

[confusedlady]

orlotron,
I've only used it at home also. From what I've read, with so many plug-ins, it is just as good. But I don't have any experience with that.

 

[flapeyre]

For my personal account, I have found Gmail's spam filter to be pretty good. Several months of using it, and only a handful of false positives. I have Gmail do a POP3 retrieval of my mail account on my regular ISP and I turned off the ISP's filter (which had too many false positives and wasn't getting nearly all of the spam). Only downside is that Gmail doesn't do POP3 retrievals often enough for me, and you can't control the interval (yet).

Solum potestis prohibere ignes silvarum.