How I Dealt With 42,365 Spam Emails Per Day!
Here’s the YouTube movie of my new solution for dealing with 42,365 spam emails per day…
Until a few days ago, I forwarded all my @scamfreezone.com email to my Gmail account and downloaded the filtered emails.
Unfortunately, Gmail got swamped. I had 1.27 MILLION emails in the spam folder. That’s an average of 42,365 hitting the account every day! The spams were taking up 5.7 GB of webspace.
But the real problem was that spams were slipping through the Gmail filters, and I was having to download them and delete them. I use Windows Mail on my desktop, and found its anti-spam “rules” to be clunky and difficult to use.
So I set up a new system, which I’m very happy with.
I created a Spam Arrest account and let it check the Gmail account. Spam Arrest checks incoming email against my whitelist of senders. Any sender who isn’t on my list gets sent a “challenge” email asking them to verify that they’re human.
I now download my emails from the Spam Arrest account, and I only get emails from people on my whitelist or people who’ve verified themselves.
For the next few days, I’m checking the Spam Arrest account via a web-browser, just to make sure it’s getting things right. So far it is… the stats are 190 emails processed, of which 115 were spam and 75 were good emails. So that’s already saved me from downloading and filtering the 115 from the 75. 
(you may be thinking why didn’t I just miss out the Gmail account and set up Spam Arrest to get emails from the scamfreezone server. The answer is that I don’t think Spam Arrest would be happy sending out 42,365 challenge emails each day just for me! I also think Gmail’s spam filters are quite good, so it seems best to leave that working and have Spam Arrest work on the Gmail-filtered emails)
What do you think? Have you got a great anti-spam system? Could you improve on mine? Leave a comment below…
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50 Responses to How I Dealt With 42,365 Spam Emails Per Day!
I USE BARRACUDA.NOT BAD.
Hi
I use spam assassin on my server with an “agressivity” setting of 8.
I get some spam but it’s really manageable so far – but it’s only been 3 years and not 11!
I imagine if I put my spam assassin filter up then I’d get even less spam.
That way I don’t have to issue a challenge to customers trying to contact me.
But these days I think people understand the need to do that.
May spammers be hung, drawn and quartered (in the cyber world).
Hi Shelley,
>But these days I think people understand the need to do that.<
I agree. I also have a Support Site for customers, which avoids email altogether.
Neil.
I use SpamArrest too and it handles thousands of e-mails per day. If someone receiving a challenge e-mail signs up for Spam Arrest then I earn a commission so I would let Gmail handle those 43,000 e-mails per day. If in doubt ask Spam Arrest customer service if it can handle 43,000 e-mails per day. I also use Gmail and their spam filter is too aggressive and it frequently traps legitimate e-mails I want to receive so I check the spam folder every day.
Hi Edward,
Interesting… thanks. I don’t think Gmail are too agressive, but I don’t check their spam folder much… it fills up faster than I can scan it.
I think I’d feel bad if I had Spam Arrest send out 43,000 emails per day on my behalf.
Neil.
How hard is it to change your email address? At some point it gets more expensive dealing with the spam than changing your address. Should be able to broadcast the change to your important contacts easily enough. The return address for your lists can handled at the autoresponder level.
You’ll start getting spam with the new address but it’ll take years for the level to build back up to what it is now.
Hi Marc,
Good point. I’m kinda tied to the @scamfreezone.com email addresses, although it’s mainly psychological.
Neil.
Good article Neil. Thanks for sharing. I used spam arrest some time ago, then quit but after watching your video I am considering to use it back.
best regards,
Teodor
This was a very informative video. I hope you will continue to rid yourself of spam. I will refer to the program you used if my spam problem escalates.
Hi Teodor,
Why’d you quit? What did you use instead of Spam Arrest?
You’re thinking of coming back… so the alternate solution didn’t work?
Neil.
Yet another great article. Thanks for sharing Neil. It’s good to know how to rid our selves of spam.
Hi Neil this sound great I’ll give it a try. Thanks Eugene
Hi Neil,
Wow, I thought I had a spam problem!
I think your system is pretty good. The only thing is I agree with Edwards that Gmail’s spam filter is a bit too aggressive. A couple of times they even put their own email (from Adsense) into the spam box!
So I think you risk missing some legitimate emails if you don’t go through your Gmail spam folder but with that many emails, who would want to?
Great video, and I can’t think of a better idea to deal with a spam problem of that magnitude.
Thanks for the kind comments, guys.
Aiden, I’ve used Gmail for many years and, while I can’t be sure I’ve never missed a vital email, I can’t think of any instances where I haven’t received an *expected* email.
As you say, with 1.27 million emails to check, I don’t have many options.
Neil.
Neil
Why dont you use google to host your email.
Google Aps has a better spam checker than gmail ( last i remember)
www.google.com/a/
You get pop, imap and more, for free.
I use it on all my domains.
Jason
Hi Niel
I thought I had a problem which must take a good hour of my day to scan and agree with gmail, even though most of the time their pretty accurate. Thanks for the article when all of my hair has been puuled out or maybe even before, I’ll get scam arrest.
Byron
Hello All,
Great article Neil, as usual. Going over everything, I realize it’s wise to start a combo use of the optioni everyone and yourself listed EARLY on! This will be a great time to start using Spam Arrest or Assassin, plus whitelist early on ANY legit emails that make it into Gmails (yes, aggressive) Spam folder. Actually, I’m glad Gmail is so aggressive, it often lets Spam into my Inbox anyway. I’m so sick of hearing from Koffi Annan about that 30 Million he wants me to have.
Hi Jason,
Err, can I claim techno-illiterate for not using Google apps?
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll check it out.
Hi Byron, I’d suggest an hour each day was too much. If it’s every day, that’s over two full weeks per year.
Hi Chris, hehe. I guess no-one will be offering me 30 million anymore, which is sad. I wrote a webpage about that scam back in 1997ish.
www.scamfreezone.com/scams/4.shtml
(check out the site layout… wooah!)
Neil.
Hey Neil,
And I thought I had spam problems…
Our server redirects all incoming email that is sent to anything “made up at workingmom.com” to a black hole. Maybe it’s just an auto delete. This way we don’t send back an error message that confirms or denies to the spammers that they’ve reached a working server or invalid email address. We’ve been online for five years, and only about 15-20 spam messages per day make it to my personal address.
This auto-delete policy has caused me to miss only a few important emails – if someone had a typo in my address, they won’t get an undeliverable message, and they don’t know I never got their message. But it’s been worth it to keep from wasting so much time on spam.
I’m also considering setting up a new email address myself. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get a select few of my friends and relatives to stop sending me forwards…and as you know, this just broadcasts my email address to any spammer who gets the subsequent forward. I plan to keep my current email address just for “my bulk email/forward lovers.” But in the meantime I plan to set up a new email address that I use for for business contacts and people with PROVEN sense and descretion about how they treat my email address -the new one will be sacrosanct. I’ll check it multiple times a day as I phase out the old one.
Once I finally make my switch; I’ll be sure to whitelist you, and tell you my new “secret” email address, (you and Linda have proven yourselves worthy of such an honor. -Just don’t make any typos when you enter it into your address book…or I’ll never know you wrote me!)
Sabrina
Neil….I really loved the movie that you made about spam e-mails. Sorry that I wasn’t around to help….I was playing in the sunshine with the kids..awesome!!!
Love You!!!! Linda
P.S. Thanks Sabrina for your really kind note…take care ! Linda
Thanks for sharing Neil.. Not the 1.27millions spams.. =)
I’d be happy to forward them to you, Erwin.
Neil.
Jeez Neil. Imagine if you had a dollar for every spam email you get each month.
You could completely QUIT doing all this other crap, huh?
I gonna figure out a way to get PAID to take SPAMs. heh heh
Thanks Neil, I must say that of all the emails I get, your’s is the one that consistentantly is of the most value. You’ve proven it again with the great tip on spam.
I really dislike spam arrest to the point that if I send an email to someone and get a spam arrest response I will not respond unless the contact is critical.
I also don’t like the fact that it’s too easy for the spam arrest response to become lost in the senders spam creating a situation where you may miss a good opportunity or an email from an old friend because spam arrest thought their email was spam.
I use a server that has an aggressive spam checker and while a few get through for the most part its manageable. Of course my spam problem isn’t quite as bad as yours but I do have one domain thats been around for the better part of ten years.
Thankfully I don’t get as much spam as you.
I have two methods to deal with. With my domain name email addresses I redirect all “catchall” messages to a free email account that I never open. All other addresses apart from the catchall don’t seem to get much spam.
Also, I use Mailwasher to view headers of incoming mail before I download. I mark all unwanted mail as spam and it bounces it advising spammers that this address is invalid.
However. I’d like to see some of the large corporations take some of the spammers to court and screw them for their houses, bank accounts and whatever. They are a f&(c%$ing nuisance.
Robin
Thanks for the video Neil, it was very helpful!
While I don’t get the amount of spam that you do, I get my fair shair of approx. 300 a day. What I do now is log into my ISP service webmail, scan the subject lines and delete the spam on their server before downloading it to my computer. This has worked well for me over the past 2 years. I used to use Mail Washer, but found I could basically do the same thing by logging into the webmail.
Nancy
Hi Neil,
sounds good to me i will check it out now.
thanks again, i am glad i’m not the only one
getting this problem.
bob…
Hi Neil,
Thanks for such an informative article. Although I am not an enough techie person, but I will definitely give it