[JohnR]

[I think this qualifies as "general computer stuff"... Echidna just let us know if not  ]

Thanks to Microsoft and some other company whose name I forget, I've unexpectedly mostly fixed my spam problem. What happened:

The amount of spam I get on my "regular" email address has gone thru the roof. Literally over a hundred a day. Since the wise sysadmins running that POP server decided to go for a user-decides aka user-pays system of spam management, I was about ready to implement either a white-list or no-one-home solution to deal with it...

Microsoft and friends to the rescue. Recently I installed a utility to enable wireless access at my new job. It didn't actually work, but it had the side-effect of creating a whole new profile for me in Windows, as a result of which I completely lost *all* my settings on this computer! I don't remember how I configured the email servers and I'm getting bloody sick of fixing email clients....

Fortunately, I was redirecting mail to the POP box I was picking it up from anyway. Solution: redirect to an email account on Yahoo. Wow! SPAM PROTECTION! Yahoo just dumps about 90% of the crap into a junk folder. It's amazing to realize how much time I was spending filtering spam manually before!

So, thank you Yahoo for making an email system that almost actually works, and thank you Microsoft for giving me yet another reason to never pay any money for your products.

[TheeeChosenOne]

Yahoo is indeed very good at spam protection.  Much, much better than Hotmail.

I had a similar exeperience!   Mail.com is also very good with spam and you get a 10mb account.

[randytsuch]

Hi guys,
I use excite's mail, have used it for years, and get basically no spam.

Only problem I have had is sometimes it seems to "overfilter".  I have had people tell  me (Michael Percy was one), they tried to send me email, but it got rejected.  Oh well, nothings perfect.

Randy

[Phat Phreddy]

For really good spam protection try cloudmarks spamnet.

It works with outlook and uses everyone on the system as the filter.  If you get any spam mail you delete it with a single click to your spam folder.. This is reported to cloudmark with a signature for that email... Once an email signature recieves a certain ratio of flags it is then considered spam and goes direct to your spam folder...

The system simply work and works well... It even has abilities like if you undelete a automaticly spam filed mailing (because its a mailing list you actually subscribed to or are interested in) you have the option of always letting that mailer pass the filter etc...

Moderating on AVS and publishing my email all over means I get 20 - 40 spam mails daily... This little SW makes it all managable...

[Thump553]

I've used webbased mail literally for years, because cable wasn't available here until about a year ago, and I used to change ISPs frequently.  I always have at least two email addresses-one for family and friends, one for "public" communications.  For the past several years I've used email.com (now www.mail.com) but no longer reccommend them-their popups are extremely annoying and reliability has been spotty recently.

One important anti-spam tip-never post your regular email in plain view in a forum or elsewhere on the internet-a sniffer program will pick it up and add it to a spam list.

Speaking of spam, I seemed to have reached a transitional stage in my life-less porn spam and more buy prescriptions/Viagra by mail spam.  Anyone else noticed this?