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[ygmir]

... I get a lot of emails from sites gmail wants to call spam, so I have to watch for those.

This is completely baffling to me. Surely, one of the key benefits to e-mail is that people -- anybody -- can get hold of me. I receive e-mails from complete strangers all over the country asking about Kinetic Sculpture Racing. This leads to all kinds of wonderful "pen-pal" exchanges and tutoring, and sometimes I eventually meet them in person at a race. But maybe I'm actually receiving only half of those who try to reach me? Bizarre.

Rant over.

yeah in the race to make things so easy for people, I think we lose lots of stuff. I don't run any filters or algorithms for spam and such......that delete key is pretty easy.

[Elliot]

It's like so many things these days -- all the superfluous automation in automobiles, for example. Bread and circuses bells and whistles, and never mind if it actually works.

Well, let's concentrate on the positive. I moved from a big city to this hermit's-cave partly because the interweb had been invented and I could keep in touch without actually being there. This is sort'a working. Nobody promised me it would be perfect.

[Eric]

Filters are anything but superfluous, they're actually overly functional, if anything.
If spam-filters didn't exist you would never be able to find the emails you wanted to read, they would be so buried amongst tens of thousands of spam emails. For my photography email, which is run through my personal site (web-based client), my provider only filters the worst offenders at the server level. It does filter "suspect" emails into a spam folder at my level - for every legit email I get, I average 10 spam emails getting to my level. The server level is probably removing several times that amount before it even gets to me.

Trust me, having to check your spam folder once or twice a week is much better than the alternative.

Yggy - one of the reasons you don't have to run filters is because it's being done at the server level above you - the negative is that emails you want are getting bounced at that level as well, and you have no control over those. Moving to a "modern" email system will get you the benefits of getting almost all of the email you want, and you don't have to set any filters if you don't want to.

[Elliot]

Yikes! Spam is really that bad! I receive only one or two a day, and I look at them immediately because a few of them are legitimate messages. But of course I could not go thru thousands of them!

Seems the problem is the spammers, then. Once again we have invented something we cannot control. And since we cannot even keep people from robbing convenience stores in broad daylight, I guess the spammers have carte blanche. A sad state of affairs, but "that's life" (I'm trying to learn).

As a practical matter, I think I would like to have a "dial" to control the level of screening at the server level. But since AT&T cannot even cancel an erroneous blacklisting when alerted to the problem.... All I can do is learn all I can, act on that, and take a pill of Fookitol when needed.

[Elliot]

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UPDATE!
I found that Outlook DOES HAVE a "dial" to control spam screening at the server level. Actually not a dial, but an on/off switch. It was "on". I changed it to "off". Will be interesting to see what appears in my spam folder.

[Eric]

The spammers and spam-fighters are basically a version of really fast evolution - as soon as the fighters come up with a block, the spammers come up with ways around it. There's big dollars at stake for spammers (an old report guestimates roughly $7,000 a day - or $2 mil a year - at the rate of 1 response for every 12.5 million emails they send!)

Not quite carte blanche, but definitely a version of the wild west.

[Elliot]

...at the rate of 1 response for every 12.5 million emails they send!

That constitutes sabotage of a public utility and should be illegal -- and vigorously prosecuted.

But... this is America, and the people who charge us money to combat spam day by day will not allow spam to be eradicated -- is my guess.

[Eric]

Actually there's a vigorous effort to control it, because it wastes bandwidth & costs the ISPs money in wasted time & energy. The problem is that your state or country might have strong laws against it, but the internet is a global web and the spammers are in countries that turn a blind eye or don't have the resources to fight it (China, Russia, the Philipines, lots of countries in Africa, India, Pakistan...). The only way to stop it is to block access to the outside world like China does to a degree, and, personally, I'd rather put up with the minor annoyance of spam than have the big annoyance of censorship.

World Wide Web = World Wide Problems

[Elderberry]

Part of the reason blocking spam is not easy is that one man's spams another man's important email. We set blocking levels on our servers based on the number of support calls we get from either spam overload or messages not received. Each of our clients has the ability or over ride the filter settings to tweak them based on their own habits, but we usually will do that for them if they are having specific problems. We use upward of 50 black lists, white lists, grey listing and various other internal algorithms, which are constantly being updated.

Most of the spam is generated from countries that the US has no jurisdiction over, so ther is no legal way to stop it at thispoint. Some spammers actually turn your computer into one of their spambots via a IRS you can pickup either from an email attachment or an infected website. So, that also makes it hard to prosecute, as your computer has become an unwitting spam machine, often times accessing all of the email addresses in your address book to add to the list they are spamming.

Lots of good advice in this thread from Trilo and Eric.

[ygmir]

latest is ATT has put a "world wide" hold on lists and messages from "burningman.com", and is stopping them at server level, where our handling rules won't see them.
I'm just changing to gmail..........

[trilobyte]

Yep, AT&T is currently blocking everything related to the burningman.com domain. No telling how long it will take them to unblock it, this does happen periodically with the smaller providers.

[ygmir]

gmail sent me a PM notice this morning!! yay!!

[Patsh]

gmail sent me a PM notice this morning!! yay!!

Yay, indeed!
I just changed mine back from rocketmail to gmail, and am now getting the notifications, too.

[Elliot]

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Thanks, JKisha, for the insider expertise!

Pure speculation but... doesn't this sound like AT&T's e-mail operation just committed suicide? The way information now can spread to every household on the planet in just a day or two....

Well, I'm trying to take to view that I can always drive to San Francisco to sign up for my Perimeter shifts and pick up my credentials. (Self-centered, ain't I! )

[trilobyte]

I doubt it, Elliot. It's happened several times in the past with AT&T, as it has with numerous other providers. Normally people only notice the blocks/outages if it happens during a time when they were expecting to get a message, and even then it doesn't lead to a mass exodus of customers.

While I'm sorry that you had to go through the process at all, I'm glad it happened during a period of down-time, and not during time-sensitive frenzies (like tickets going on sale or when critical shift/credential emails are going out to volunteer teams).

[Elliot]

Right. My worry is that it CAN happen at a critical time. But since we cannot fix it, we will deal with it.

[GreyCoyote]

Elliot: if you miss some emails due to provider filtering, you can always log-on to your "bucket" account and retrieve them. This is a new service for US citizens. The email address is [email protected] and the password is your social security number. They have at least the last 7 years, unfiltered, for review.

(kidding. mostly. Hehehe)

[Elliot]

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That sure seems like something Wile E. Coyote would come up with, yes.

Now... here is an interesting tidbit: It has now been 2 1/2 days since I turned off filtering at the server level on this Outlook account, and I have not received a single spam. As I understood Eric, I could have expected a couple hundred of them. About ten e-mails have showed up in the spam box, but all were "good" e-mails. So... maybe turning that "pre-screening" off doesn't really? Or am I just too scary for even Nigerian spammer to dare fool with?

[GreyCoyote]

I have a private mailserver that supports a half a dozen domains running on an old Compaq server. It sits naked before the storm and I completely control it. I can tell you that with the spam filters completely off, it takes less than a minute or two for the first spam to hit, and after a day or two the trickle turns into a flood.

Pretty impressive that the spammers seem to share info about deliverability better than the anti-spammers do.

[Elliot]

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Thanks. Then I know that "off" does not mean anything like that. Why am I not surprised?!

But I realize this may be the best solution. I sure don't want Russian fountain-of-youth pills -- I just thought I might get a measure of the volume.

[GreyCoyote]

I'm with ya, Elliot! They keep sending me breast enlargement ads. And I'm like WTF? Idont they understand that Id spend good money to get RID of these damned things!

[theCryptofishist]

What, you're not getting the Nigerian Liposuction ads?

[ygmir]

it seems the blacklisting has been lifted.

[trilobyte]

Excellent - it's also worth noting that nearly a week after I submitted the form AT&T requested (and where they promised that someone would contact me within 48 hours), I've still had no response.

[BoyScoutGirl]

Thanks for all your follow-up work on this, trilobyte!

[Elliot]

Indeed! "Three cheers and a tiger" for Trilobyte!

(Of course, by now I have transferred all my subscriptions -- ePlaya, GP&E, eBay & PayPal, Facebook, and so forth to my Outlook address, and they are staying there.)

[trilobyte]

No problem, I'm glad to be able to help where I can.