Spam Email Yes You Can Do Something
When spam equates to ten or so this is what we call manageable, when it numbers 100 or so a day it's time to get out the thinking caps and find a way to reduce this unwanted and hated menace. If your email inbox or junk folder swelling lately out of all proportion, well your not alone so is ours and we are so sick and tired of it we thought we do something about it and proceeded to show you what you can do about reducing the spam that hits yours and our email accounts.
Just recently our mail servers are bursting at the seems with unsolicited junk mail, fortunately Thunderbird has a very effective junk filter which does a pretty good job of detecting annoying junk mail, there are several ways that Thunderbird can deal with this email. It can do nothing if that is what you prefer, or you can use the Mozilla / Thunderbird external blacklists to filter out these troublesome emails from your inbox and deliver them instead to your junk box. Why not just delete the junk emails, well the possibility exists that some of the mail that your inbox receives may not be junk, this effectively gives you two chances to change your mind before it is deleted permanently.
The trouble here is that whilst you can delete this email and remove it from the inbox it has a habit of coming back and in every increasing quantities. So far we have not even touched on the subject of what to do about your spam, so lets make a start.
There is this site on the Internet it is a site called SpamCop there may be others that offer a similar service but this is the one we thought we would give a try. Once you have registered with the site any unsolicited or junk email you wish to dispose of this site offers to send to the originating site administrator a request to suspend emails to your account, this is accomplished by way of the email headers more about this later.
What to do
- Locate the spamcop.net website SpamCop
- Register with this site your details
- Open Thunderbird or similar email client
- Select the folder the spam is in be it inbox, junk or deleted
- Select one of the suspected emails
- Check you are not anti-spamming a friend by mistake or important message
- Press control key + "u" or Menu >> View >> Message Source (not both)
- Press control "a" to select all the Message including headers
- Press control "c" for copy or right mouse button >> copy
- Select spamcop.net browser
- Paste into Report Spam window
- Select process spam refresh and or press allow after 10 seconds
- Select send reports
The email headers are the tracking system log of your emails each email has one it contains information from where it has been sent and via what route. Armed with this information SpamCop can email automatically the ISP's and the originating offender. In the hopes that blocks will be put in place to prevent spam filtering through, spam is not only a nuisance it cost's you and I money ISP's have an equal and vested interest in reducing or eliminating spam, spam takes up considerable space on email servers because every one gets so much of it.
Repeat the process for each and every occurrence of spam email, hopefully you will see an improvement fairly quickly.
Spamcop.net is free to use but if you can donate something not to us but to spamcop you may be doing the world a favour.
Other sites that can provide a more comprehensive information on spam related material.
Update 5th November 2008
We had expected a reduction in spam using the above method but nothing on the scale that we have so far witnessed. Since last Wednesday a whole week ago for every spam email we had received we reported, we did expect an improvement but not this good. We are not sure how long it will hold for but a significant reduction has been noted not just on my inbox but all accounts across our server. Without boasting in any way we measure the reduction of spam in the region of 80 - 85% we believe this method is worth a try. If this works for you or even if it doesn't please leave us your comments.
