scam

Another crack at reducing spam

 

There are pathological people who are quite happy to spoil something good for everyone else if it is to their advantage. The internet in general is a great example of that and spam in particular.

On a good day, I receive about twice as many spam emails as legitimate emails. On a bad day it is worse.

Add to that there are constant attacks on the server and websites by people who are trying to hack a site so it will send spam, adding to the problem, and it is an ongoing pain in the arse.

RBL SPAM filtri | DNSBL | DNS blacklist | Hitrost.com
It makes a blog post more interesting to have some sort of image, but don’t be fooled, this is grossly inaccurate. The ratio of spam to legitimate email (for me) should be reversed.

In an effort to reduce the incoming spam count I have enabled one of the RBL’s (Realtime Black Lists).

The risk is always that it causes too many false positives – marking legit email as spam – and becoming a headache in itself.

If this works, it should be obvious within a day or so. Stand by for an update 😛

Beware some domain registration emails

 

I regularly receive an email from confused customers asking “is this email real?” and I always praise them for being wary.  There are many many scams on the internet and I am happy to help sort the scam from the spam and the ham.

This particular email is sent regularly and it can actually be prevented (see below).

fs

The email is skilfully written to be as confusing as possible – note the highlighted line.  It sounds ominous “Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiation date may result in cancellation of this offer”.  Well whoopee do!  They may cancel the offer  of registering your domain on search engines…something that is completely unnecessary.

So if you receive this, convert it from scam to spam.

And if you want to not receive this sort of email, for $5.50 per year 123host offers domain privacy which will hide your real email from the scammers.