Keeping Spam Email In Check in Apple Mail (Mac)

Derek Land — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:35:31 +0000

Every once in a while I get a rash of spam – that bad-tasting, over-pasteurized junk email that clutters up my inbox and disrupts not only personal email (which isn’t so bad, just irritating) but also interferes with my business email – both of which come to the same account. Losing a personal email when I batch-delete what spam gets through isn’t the end of the world, but losing a business email, well, that can be bad. Still not End-of-the-World bad, but you get the idea.

So how to stop spam, or at least slow it down to a mere trickle? If you’re like me and you use Mail on a Macintosh computer, you’re in luck.

In former days when an address got too bogged down, I create a new one, change over all the records I could so they knew where to find me (Netflix, Amazon, etc), then wait a couple months to make sure everyone who wanted to contact me knew where to contact me, and then delete the onld one.

How naive! There is a much simpler way to deal with annoying spam.

Outside of the built-in spam filter that comes with Mail, which learns from and adapts from what mail you consistently junk, there’s an even better way – Bouncing.

The Problem With Junking & Built-In Spam Filters

The problem with junk mail filters is that they don’t block spam, they just send it packing directly to the trash. So effectively what happens is Mail could wind up junking a message you’d rather it didn’t (rarely, however.) Note, also, that simply junking spam still allows the junk to arrive in your inbox in the first place – and there’s The Problem.

Spammers work like this:

They randomly generate tens of thousands of address at a certain domain, or
They crawl popular websites to find email addresses – which are surprisingly common
They then send their spam to these addresses
In the case of generated addresses, they note which addresses are live (eg, receiving mail), and celebrate a small victory
They then send this email address to all their spamming buddies, who then send it on to all their spamming buddies, who then send it on… you get the idea.
Email addresses that aren’t live are chopped from the list.

Back to the Bouncing

Bouncing spam works because when you “bounce” an email, you effectively are sending the email back to the sender, with the message “This address does not exist.” It bounces the spam off your address and sends it packing. It’s kind of like a snail-mail letter being “returned to sender” because there’s no resident at a given address, or better yet there’s no such address there at all.

To bounce your junk email, simply hit the key combination Command-Shift-B (B for Bounce, get it?)

Command-Shift-B

CMD-SHFT-B

C-S-B

Now, it works because the spammer people don’t record your address – you’ve sent the message your address doesn’t exist, so they think they’ve just hit on another non-existent email address.

How Long Does It Take?

If you start getting spam, it is imperative you bounce every single message. Even one spam message allowed to get through the Outer Wall of defense waves a little red flag for the bad guys and makes them keep sending.

It may take a couple weeks of consistent, regular bouncing of all spam for you to notice – it takes a while for the message to get across.

Case in point: About twice a year, I get a wicked rash of spam. Now, I’m very cagey about my email address on the internet, so how mine got out there I have no idea (unless some shady dot-commer betrayed his promise in the EULA… to which I say, May Your Hard Drive Always Fry and Your Screen Always Have Dead Pixels.) Enter the Bouncing method. Every time, I bounce all the spam, and about three days later it slows by about half, then within a couple weeks it’s 99% gone.

I’m not saying this will work every time, and if you use Thunderbird you’re up chocolate creek w/o a popsicle stick because I’ve had nothing but trouble with Thunderbird and don’t recommend you use it.

So, may your LED screens always have backlighting and the keys rise to meet you(r fingers).

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

Quick: 1 Fantastic Way to Block Spam on a WordPress Blog

Derek Land — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:22:01 +0000

ThisIsInspired has been getting plugged with spam galore. Granted, we have Akismet installed and it prevents and sorts most of the spam that comes our way — but there’s an even more root way to prevent spammers from sending their junk in the first place.

Via IP Address

If you Bing* “block ip wordpress” you’ll find this easy enough but it’s worth sharing again for the sake of posterity (and to save you a few minutes of going and Binging [sic] in the first place and sifting through the results.)

Using Coda or Textmate (or even TextEdit or Notepad) open the .htaccess file on your server. If you’re using Transmit or some other FTP client that hides hidden files, you’ll have to un-hide them first; .htaccess is a hidden file.

Insert this little tidbit of code: (yes, these IP numbers are actual spammers, so if you want to copy them feel free)

order allow,deny
deny from 150.254.161.3
deny from 221.214.27.253
deny from 207.44.255.162
deny from 93.62.4.207
deny from 74.118.192.14
allow from all

Enter deny from and then the IP number. You’ll have to do this for each IP you wish to block.

Wildcards

If you, as with me, have discovered that Spam Galore has set up camp in a consistent subnet (eg: 256.256.whatever.whatever), you can use wildcards to block everything from one subnet on down the line. So in this instance, using a wildcard, we’d go:

256.256.*.*

Just remember to put on asterisk in place of whatever singular number (between the periods). This matches any number.

Only use this if you are really, really sure you want to block an entire subnet of addresses. You don’t want to block legitimate people from reading your blog.

* As you can tell, I don’t use Google unless absolutely required.