the eyepool

Want to cut down on email spam? Add a filter to your email program that will trash any messages whose From address starts with “contact@”.

I set up such a filter two weeks ago, and so far it’s caught about 90% of the junk that otherwise makes it through even my ISP’s and Apple Mail.app’s spam blockers. (I think there may have been one false positive, but not more. Apparently almost no one sends real email from a contact@ address.)

(FYI, all of these spams seem to be the result of one network. They’ve recently implemented a trick to work around DomainKey, which is an anti-spam measure that digitally signs an email message to prove that it legitimately came from the email domain in its From address. DomainKey is great for stopping spam with forged @gmail.com or @amazon.com addresses, but what these spammers have done is registered a buttload of randomly-named domains and installed DomainKey on them, so they can send out spam with valid DomainKey signatures from their domains. The signature gives spam-filters a warm fuzzy feeling about the message, making it less likely to be marked as spam. Presumably the anti-spam folks are blacklisting these domains as fast as they can, but it’s easy for the spammers to keep registering more. I don’t know where this particular arms race will end.)