Hi Janice! What are you using to check email? I use mutt, running with Cygwin on my Win2k machine. I've installed the UNIX spam freeware called SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) and it's awesome! Filters out 99% of my spam with barely any false positives - and it can be trained. I think there are ports of it for Windows based email clients. Check it out!

An example analysis of an email is as follows, where the following is added to the email's header:
X-Spam-Report: ---- Start SpamAssassin results
9.60 points, 5 required;
* 0.1 -- BODY: Tells you how to stop further spam
* 1.4 -- BODY: Claims to be legitimate email
* 0.1 -- BODY: Free Offer
* 0.7 -- BODY: Talks about money with an exclamation!
* 0.8 -- BODY: Stop with the offers, coupons, discounts etc!
* 0.1 -- BODY: Claims you can be removed from the list
* 0.0 -- BODY: To be removed from list
* 1.2 -- BODY: Message is 20% to 30% HTML
* 0.1 -- BODY: HTML included in message
* 0.1 -- BODY: HTML link text says "click here"
* 0.8 -- RAW: Message text in HTML without specified charset
* 0.3 -- Date: is 3 to 6 hours before Received: date
* 0.1 -- Message only has text/html MIME parts
* 0.5 -- Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
* 0.1 -- Asks you to click below
* 2.6 -- Forged mail pretending to be from AOL
* 0.6 -- Message looks like Outlook, but isn't
---- End of SpamAssassin results
X-Spam-Flag: YES

Hi Cecil! Thanks for the tips. Yes, I am already using SpamAssassin, actually it is included with my webhosting package, installed on my hosting server.

What I use right now, is Spam Assassin http://www.spamassassin.org PLUS MailWasher http://www.mailwasher.net . MailWasher is like a mail pre-filter program (ie you run it prior to checking your mail). It also filters based on "known spammer" lists, your own defined filters, and heuristics. AND - this is the best thing - it bounces the spam back to the originator so it will look like your address is invalid!

So anyway, using these two programs together, not much spam gets through to me. However, MailWasher is STILL a manual run program (ie I come in every day and see my big list of spam, but just click "Process Mail" to get rid of it all. However, throughout the day I still get "New Mail" notifications if spam comes in and must click "Process Mail" to get rid of it too). It's still a manual process. I wish there was an option to automate it.

Anyway, in spite of using MailWasher to bounce all the spam I'm getting, I *still* get it every day, tons and tons. So I was thinking that perhaps new spammers are getting my address every day. So, hence, removing the "mailto" links from my pages in addition to all bouncing and all that... hopefully at some point I will start to see my daily spam count decline!

Cool! Apparently, there is and auto-delete option in MailWasher. You may wish to research it a bit. I can't stand spam!!! Oh, another thing I do is: on my website, I only list my email as a GIF/JPG image, so spiders can't just do a grep for email addresses and add me to their lists. For even more security, one should also use a background pattern for the email address image. Good luck!

Hi Cecil, if you ever figure out how to use auto-delete in MailWasher let me know, because I have researched and have been unable to set it up to my liking.

I found that they have the option to "auto-delete" which means, automatically checking the "delete", "bounce", and/or "blacklist" options for the filtered mail. So yeah, I have that enabled. Then, it has an option to not SHOW the filtered mail in the mail list, which is what I want - I don't even want to see that stuff. However, I found that even when I enabled that option, I still get the "New Mail" notification for this filtered mail. So the thing says, "New Mail", I go to the mail list and say, "What the heck, there's no new mail here!" (because the filtered mail doesn't show), and that is just as annoying and more confusing.

What I would really like, is for it to not show the filtered spam mail, not notify me about the filtered spam mail, and automatically run that "Process Mail" thing on the new mail so I never never see it. It seems to me that the MailWasher folks are too concerned about the possibility of deleting legitimate mail. However, in the ... hmmm... 4 months or so I've been using it it's only been wrong with ONE message to my knowledge. And I have the filtering turned up to the max. I think it'd be worth it have the option of having all this stuff done for me automatically so that I never see the spam.

Oh - and I forgot to say, that is a good idea about the GIF for your e-mail. What do you mean about the background image? Also, isn't it the link that the spiders will be able to find? I always imagined that they searched for any link with the "mailto" in front of it.

Anyway, I think my e-mailing form should do the trick, as long as I find and remove anywhere that I have my actual address posted. The cgi script behind the form gets my address from a config file stored outside of "webspace" so no spider should be able to find that.

Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that I simply list my email address in the image, I don't do the mailto thang. I make my readers type in my address manually. Hee hee.
Oh, forget what I said about the background image stuff... i must be on drugs.

Janice/Cecil, you may also want to check out http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php.

It encodes your email address so the robots can't recognize it.

Could you tell me how you made your pvc pool volleyball frame? Thanks so much!!
Melinda

06.02.2003 09:56am - Pool Volleyball & Text Messages
"On Sunday, we went out and bought/made a volleyball net for the pool so we can play some water volleyball. We bought a net and used some PVC pipe from Home Depot to put it up over the pool. It is pretty cool and fun!"

Hi Melinda, sorry I have taken so long to get back to you on this. I have been on vacation, and also... just wondering how to describe it. Maybe if I can find a picture it would be easier. We haven't put the volleyball net up yet for this season but we should do it soon.

Anyway, our net came with long plastic poles which the net is supposed to attach to for use in the grass/sand. Our pool has two holes on each side in the shallow end which I think are FOR the purpose of a volleyball net or maybe a rope-off for the shallow end. Anyway, we bought PVC pipe that would fit down into those holes in the side of our pool, because we didn't want to cut down the poles that came with the net in case we do want to use it in the grass at some point. Plus those poles weren't quite the right diameter for the pool holes. Anyway, then we just mimicked the way the net usually attaches to the poles on our new PVC poles - which meant, drilling some holes and slots in the same locations as on the other poles. And then attached the net the way it usually attaches to the poles - with some ropes and plastic connectors that it came with.

I'm not sure if that is helpful at all. If I can find a picture I will post it, or maybe take a new pic when we put the net up again this year.