OT: Why am I getting 100 times more spam than others?

[Richard Wilson]

Josef Lowder wrote:
> In the past, I have pleaded for help with this issue, and some have
> responded with frustration that I brought this up again ... so I
> apologize in advance for bringing this up again now.  But the problem
> has worstened to an enormously frustrating extent.
>
> More than 2,000 spam email messages now come into my gmail account
> every day.  It is perplexing and infuriating to me that google/gmail
> will not allow creating filters to *delete* (not just move to trash)
> all this garbage that is clearly identifiable and definable.
>
> Recently, gmail began to mark about half to 2/3rds of this garbage
> with the title *****SPAM***** in the subject line.  Why would they
> bother doing that instead of just totally blocking or automatically
> deleting forever all this garbage rather than just labeling it as
> SPAM?   Or at least give us the option to choose to have all such mail
> deleted rather than put into a spam folder.
>
> I (and many others) have written to Google and to Gmail forums about
> this numerous times, but of course no one at Google ever responds.
>
> What prompts this message today is that I have recently talked with
> other email users  who are even larger volume users of email than I
> and they have expressed amazement at the volume of spam that I am
> receiving.  Because, they have reported to me that they are *not*
> receiving even 1/100th of the volume of spam that I receive.
>
> So, can anyone recommend any remedy or alternate, perhaps even a paid
> web mail service, by which I might be able to gain some control over
> this nightmare?
>
> I would certainly be willing to pay for a solution.
>
> Help!
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>   

I can't know what GMail does, but that tag you mention is one trick we 
use in my work (managing a bunch of Mail Relay servers for corporate 
clients). We have multiple anti spam scanners and the first one (an 
expensive one both in $ and system resources) has an extremely low false 
positive rate. If it determines that something is spam, it goes straight 
to our quarantine area, where end users can release it if they want 
(they can see the sender, date, time and subject in a web interface). 
Mail that gets through this hurdle then gets passed through 
Spam-Assassin, which has a much higher false positive rate. Messages 
that SA thinks are spam we "tag" -- prepending "*** spam ***" to the 
subject. We also scan messages for viruses and "forbidden" attachments.

If you've ever had a client executive go completely ballistic over a 
false positive message that was blocked, you can understand why we err 
on the side of caution. We have to calm them down, have them (or more 
likely their secretary) go out to the quarantine website and release the 
message in question.

Another "trick" we used that I pass on for what it's worth -- this one 
probably saved us a LOT of grief: when a message is stripped of an 
attachment because our Corporate Security has decided that there's too 
much risk in letting attachments of a particular type through, the 
message, without the attachment gets to their inbox with lines added 
that explain that the attachment was removed due to corporate 
requirements. It then points them at an internal website explaining the 
policy, which features the CIO's name in the URL. Having this guy's name 
put in front of them makes them realize that they just can't call us to 
say they've *got* to have something let through -- the CIO would have to 
approve it (and they know better than to go that route).

Richard Wilson