SPAM HELL!!

[Kevin Taylor]

Just curious but is anybody else getting a massive amount of Spam routed throught the GuitarTricks website...

Like, every single day, I check my Outlook Express and sure enough... there's at least 20 - 40 Spam messages mixed in with the legitimate emails from GuitarTricks members.

I've found that I accidently erase legitimate message from guitar players cause I automatically assume they're spam.

Any ideas on how I can adjust my Guitar Tricks user message so that only legitimate emails get through?

Like, I'd be willing to have a specific 'Guitar Tricks Host Reply' form.... ie, the only way to write me questions from guitar tricks is to actually use the Guitar Tricks

LIke I said.... whenever I download my email using Outlook Express, I get a long list of spam and maybe 5 or 10 legitimate guitartricks messages.

Any ideas..... ( and no....unsubsribing doesnt' work)

[Jon Broderick]

I am having the exact same problem. Are you suggesting that we get rid of "schmange@guitartricks" and just route email to your personal address?

I have been planning to stop receiving jbroder@guitartricks.com for the same reason.

I think these spammers get our email address off the webpage, so if we just didn't print out schmange@guitartricks.com on the page, that might clear it up too.

Here are the choices I can see right now (add more if you like)

1. Turn off schmange@guitartricks.com, route email to your real address behind the scenes.
2. Don't display schmange@guitartricks.com on the page (but still route it to you).
3. do nothing.

Let me know what you think.

Jon

[James8831]

have you seen these antispam sites? such as

http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/

they make it easier to give spammers a kick , OK,it can take some work and you may say "Why should I", but at least it gives the spammers a slap, if nothing else.

I may have got some spam from here,but it's unlikely,and difficult for me to tell,as i'm not highly computer literate.

Don't click on unsubscribe in a message as that will give the buggers ideas and they can send you more spam from a different "front end" email address. You can try clicking the properties tab of a mail and finding the details.



To do this in Outlook Express right-click/properties/detail and look at the X-from address. In Outlook Express you can also click tools/Inbox Assistant/Add- this gives you the option of "banning" senders. I copy the x-from address and tell outlook to delete those message off the server,so they do't get to me in the first place.

I'm fairly certain you can get the same result in Netscape.

My blocked list is excruciatingly long!

Plus i also keep a couple of webmail [north.org and webmail.com] and "dirty" email accounts incase someone wants an email address for me and i dont want to give them my "clean" ones - you know those mp3 sites where they want your life history so you can listen to your mate's music,etc

Ok that may not be pertinent for your guitartricks.com mail- but i find it fine for personal use.

Kill the spam!!!

cheers.

[James8831]

possibly this may be worth looking into?

http://www.matterform.com/?page=spamvaccine/

..or something similar.

cheers.

[river]

huh.i post here pretty regular but have never gotten any
spam mail. maybe ya gotta do the email thing or somethin ?

[Kevin Taylor]

Actually, just removing the email address from my host page would probably do the trick. It's the only place I can think of where spammers might be getting it from. That would also encourage anyone who wants to legitimately write me to use the reply form too. (which is great cause I can have Outlook flag those messages.)

I don't think I wanna change the schmange@guitartricks.com address just yet cause most of the spam I get is fairy new on a weekly basis...so I think after a few weeks they'll (hopefully) die down.
If not I can always change it later,

So basically, turn off the email address on my host page but still keep routing them to me for now, until I see what happens.

Thanks Jon.

[Jon Broderick]

OK. Let me know what happens.

[David Gilmour]

I dunno if this would work, but have you thought of keeping your e-mail address on your host page, but in the form of a picture, so that spambots couldn't pick it up?

[Kevin Taylor]

Not a bad idea but personally I'd prefer it if people just use the form page to send me messages. If they do that, I can be sure of getting it cause I can set up my email reader to automatically flag anything sent from 'Guest Host Message', But if somebody just mails something to schmange@guitartricks.com, there's a really good chance that I'll miss it, cause unless the person does something to make it stand out in the subject line, it just looks like another spam.

[Jon Broderick]

has it gotten any better since I took schmange@guitartricks.com off your page?

[Kevin Taylor]

Not really. I still get anywhere from 10 - 50 a day depending on what time of the week it is.
A lot of them are repeats though.