Gmail Spam

dutopia

As stated by Rym many times Gmail is probably the best web based service on the web, I'm not here to reiterate that stuff but want to discuss Gmail's handling of spam. First of all I just want to say I hate spam with a vengeance, I'm not sure why it bothers me so much, but I'm very careful when it comes to displaying and giving out my email address. I use the usual tools, Bugmenot, and an alternative email when signing up to sites who I don't fully trust. But spammers always find new ways of grabbing your address, and this is the way they got mine..

On eBay when someone buys something from me, they get an automatic response thanking the buyer for their purchase, and it gives them instructions on how to pay etc. Spammers were using this to get my address, and of course not paying for the product. Meaning I have to cancel the sale and open a non payment dispute, leaving the item off the 'market', and getting spammed in the mean time. These had been some discussions in the eBay forums about this but still nothing seems to have been done to stop it, I wonder if they can. One thing to note though, all the fake buying and spamming action is coming from China. I think this is a fairly aggressive way to spam.. and wonder what other lengths will these people go to, to get email addresses in the future.

So in Gmail i start getting between 10-30 messages a day, all arriving in my Gmail inbox. They were all in the "Question from eBay member XXX" format, so i tried to set up some filters to deal with this. The body of the message always changes, so i went with the subjects, of which constantly change to make it into my inbox.

Wow, i just had a bit rant sorry. I want to know from the rest of you how you deal with spam? And how did any spammers find out your email address (If you know at all?).

MitchyD

I've been getting more and more spam lately in Gmail... Delete.

navelfluff

Wow, i just had a bit rant sorry. I want to know from the rest of you how you deal with spam? And how did any spammers find out your email address (If you know at all?).

I have gotten some spam because I took the chance of giving my address to shady websites. Luckily I had the foresight to use a secondary hotmail address for such things.

I have deduced that the spam to my main accounts come from the fact that the addresses have been publicly available on the web. At first I wasn't aware that there were spam bots searching the web for addresses. I then removed my email addresses from wherever I could. I have made a habit of googling for my own addresses a couple of times a year, and sure enough - every now and then someone have written it somewhere (I am in a situation where a lot of people need to contact me, so it's not very surprising). I do my best to make people remove my address. During the last few years the amount of spam has been reduced from 30 or more a day to maybe 20 per week - even though I use the same addresses.

Spam bots also try random user names on much used domain names. joe@bigcompany.com will be found very fast. The only solution would be to get a new and more complicated address. joe1337isaveryhardguytofindomgwtf@tinydep.smallcompany.se will probably never get spam if the address is not made public. You probably just read in another thread that I get a lot of spam to my unused Gmail account. I am now fairly sure that is because I have a user name that is also used by other people elsewhere, and on one of the most used domain names in the world.

If you need to put your address on a web page, use an email scrambler. That is fairly safe.

dutopia

I've been getting more and more spam lately in Gmail... Delete.

Instant delete of course, but it's annoying that it gets into your Inbox for a while instead of going straight to Spam.

Tasel

I get a bunch of spam, but proabbly about 99% of it gets caught by Apple's Mail. The 1% that sneaks through these days I just mark as junk and let the filter get progressivly better at catching everything.

Apreche

On the rare occasion you do get spam in your Gmail Inbox, just mark it as spam. Within a few days at the most you won't see that message anymore. There is no need to set any sort of manual filter.

Also, the idea that spammers "get" your e-mail address is preposterous. Domains are public information. Everyone knows that there are e-mail addresses gmail.com. Everyone knows there are e-mail addresses at aol.com. Spammers will just send mail to any old address at gmail.com. If that address doesn't exist, they will find out because they get an error message telling them so. Your e-mail address is not something you can keep secret. It is trivial to guess, and spammers will eventually find it by brute force.

If you don't believe it, then setup a domain. Then set a catch-all which will take any e-mail send to any address at that domain and put it in your inbox. You are going to start seeing a lot of e-mail very soon. Even though you might not have ever posted an e-mail address at that domain anywhere ever, and the domain is brand new, there will be spam. I would even go so far as to say there really isn't any point in trying to keep your e-mail address secret. Even if you give it to spammers, good filters will take care of all the work. You wouldn't even know they are spamming you.

navelfluff

(...) I would even go so far as to say there really isn't any point in trying to keep your e-mail address secret. Even if you give it to spammers, good filters will take care of all the work. You wouldn't even know they are spamming you.

It is possible that there is no way to avoid spam on large providers like gmail.com. By experience and this article from 2003 (I think the principles are still valid) you can avoid spam, or at least avoid being flooded. Even though spammers use brute force to obtain addresses, they focus on sites and user names that gives the best results. Smaller companies are not hit as hard as large ones, and dfjgh345g789@company.com is safer than jsmith@company.com.

There are basically two different strategies:
1. Avoid spammers finding your address
2. Have the best bad-ass spam filter you can get

So far #1 has worked quite well for me.

YoshoKatana

Well, gmail has a good spam filter, and I don't think I've ever had any real mail sucked into it. For bacon (yes, people have started using it. No, we spell it with an 'o'), I filter the messages into different places. W00t.

Kazuo

I have been somewhat careful with throwing my email around the internet, but somehow I still get about 100 spam messages in my Gmail, but they all get filtered to the spam folder. I only get one in my inbox about once every couple of months... Maybe people who have spam in their inbox just have a smarter breed of spammers attacking them.