July 11, 2004
Curious George: E-mail bouncing service?
I recently had to close an E-mail box on my hosted server since it was getting 300 spams per day. This address was important though, and I'd like to bounce messages with an unharvestable graphics image of my new E-mail address for the benefit of the few legit people who try writing me. Unfortunately....
...unfortunately doing direct bounces (via autoreply) is dangerous. Why? A lot of the spam uses AOL return addresses, and thus after receiving some of these bounces AOL thinks I'm spamming it and blacklists my SMTP server. Then I can no longer write to customers or friends at AOL addresses for up to 24-48 hours until the block is lifted. So are there any companies to which I can redirect my mailbox who do bouncing services (and who might be savvy enough to avoid such blocks themselves)? I really can't bring myself to working with this mailbox directly as it's so infested with spam. [[shaking fist]] You damn spammers!
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This is not quite what you were asking for, but I have had great luck with spam sieve. It is one of the programs that works with your email program to filter your email using a Bayesian (spelling?) search of the words in the mail. You install it and then have to "train it" by adding both good and bad (i.e. spam) to let it learn what to move to your spam box. Works pretty damn well and I only occasionally get spam in my mail box and from time to time have to check my spam box to see if a piece of "good" mail was inadvertently put there.
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logic filters help keep the spam away. mozilla / thunderbird has a good bayesian filter built in. i've also found that you can HTML-encode your email address and stop spammers from seeing it - use the appropriate code for each letter and the @ symbol. looks weird in the source code, but browsers display it just fine. spam harvesters that read the source don't recognize it as an email address. (do it for both the address itself and for the mailto: link.) link to do the translating for you can be found here. but that doesn't help your current situation much, does it? how about this - can you do it as a vacation message auto-reply? this is a standard feature of many email programs, and shouldn't be seen as spam... although attaching a graphic would make that more likely. maybe send it in the auto-reply as a human-readable address, like "mynewaddress at (spam sucks, delete this part) new dot domain dot com? i think it's probably the picture that AOL is keying on. and make sure the message is sent as plain text. vacation reply rather than auto-bounce is better, because generally it tracks who it has replied to, and thus sends only one email to each incoming address rather than responding to all of them automatically.