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 MortyPremium
join:2004-09-18 | reply to NormanS
Re: [E-mail] Comcast Spam Blockers are AWFUL said by NormanS:What I find interesting is that Yahoo! SpamGuard does a great job of filtering email to two SBC e-mail accounts (pacbell.net domain) that I am managing. Yet some SBC Yahoo! customers complain that SpamGuard isn't working. OTOH, my sister, a Comcast customer, thinks that Brightmail is doing a great job of filtering her Comcast email. Maybe it just depends upon how you configure the filter options. Not really, I have to say it does a poor job. Myself, I get about 50 spam e-mails a day. As I said, mine is just my name, so it's easily guessed by a spam bot using a name dictionary. However, I've never used it for any online form, and it's not listed in any directory. And most of the e-mails should be easily flagged as spam even if only by the subject lines  | |
NormanSPremium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
kudos:4 Reviews:
 ·SONIC.NET
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| Actually, the Subject line can be the hardest part to filter on. The majority of the spam which makes it past SpamGuard (which isn't a lot) falls to a home-grown filter on my MTA. Subject line filters hardly factor into the matter of whether the email will go to the Inbox, or be diverted to the spam handling account.
--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum | |
MortyPremium
join:2004-09-18 | Yep, I understand that, however if you looked at some of the subject lines they're pretty questionable. Enough that if I send the same e-mail to hotmail it gets blocked. It's silly, and one of the largest customer beefs. | | |
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NormanSPremium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
kudos:4 Reviews:
·SONIC.NET
·Pacific Bell - SBC
| 
Subject lines. |
said by Morty:Yep, I understand that, however if you looked at some of the subject lines they're pretty questionable. Enough that if I send the same e-mail to hotmail it gets blocked. It's silly, and one of the largest customer beefs. MSN Hotmail uses Brightmail for filtering spam; the same Brightmail that Comcast uses. I have an MSN Hotmail account with the filters notched up to the max; "Exclusive", and "Immediate Delete". If the sender is not in my Address Book, or Safe List, their message will not be seen by me. If I didn't do it that way, I'd be seeing spam in the Junk folder of that email account.
Also, in the enclosed screen shot, I circled two points of commonality in the assorted Subject lines. At some point, your filter will grow pretty large, trying to filter on whole phrases, and spelling variations. My MTA spam filter is a 38.5 KByte text file, filled with regex rules. Most of the rules are not invoked, I imagine. Regex is needed to deal with the fact that single word filtering is dangerous. If I used the circled words, in my example, I would lose any good email that had those words in the Subject line. Should I just send my correspondents a list of "forbidden words"? I use a combination of header and body checks, assigning low score values to individual words which, in normal correspondence don't usually occur in the same combination as in spam. OTOH, most people don't want to take the time to ramrod their own filters, as I am doing. It is pretty labor intensive, and risks false positives; I see a lot of those. Some might say, too many for me to consider my filters truly effective.
As a small aside, I notice that the most heavily spammed email account, not the one in the screen shot, only has 31 spam messages in the Bulk folder today. About a month ago, that would have been between 95 and 120. Although I changed the default public profile ID in the accounts, that was too short a time ago to be a cause. I suspect it is the result of turning of email munging in my SpamCop reporting account. Now the spam supporting hosts are passing my email addresses back to the spammers; I suspect that I am being listwashed. Since you have a wad of spam, why not set up a SpamCop reporting account, with your email address unmunged in the forwarded spam, and see if you can corroborate my experience?
--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum | |
moot7Premium
join:2005-12-23
Powder Springs, GA | reply to Morty
Pretty much the same here. I don't ever remember using my Comcast email account to communicate even with Comcast -
and still get tons of spam - I check the account once in awhile - have a few hundred spam messages in it whenever I check. Some of course were from Comcast telling me my bill was ready for viewing - I was considering letting it just fill up, like putting in some very big pictures, like max.
Anybody tried that yet? Would it stop me from sending mail out? I do use Outlook Express, inbound comes from my web site, but my host does not allow me to send, so I'm stuck sending through Comcast. Web Mail is kind of clumsy and is to dependent on connectivity. Even if I can't connect I still find it useful to be able to at least compose and send when the connection comes back. | |
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