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Convert Mail to
Other Format |
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- The first rule of thumb is "always bring your mail
with you." If you change clients, or you change OS's, there is
always a way, however roundabout or painful, to get mail into a usable
form. This may involve installing Outlook, exporting all of your mail
to Outlook, and importing it all from outlook, but it is worth it.
Worst comes to worst, redirect it all back to yourself.
- If you do this religiously, you will only ever have to worry about
your current mail format, and how you're going to upgrade it all to
your new mail client. For archiving, you can either put it all in a
folder that you never open or search, or under a different account
that you never open or search, but at least it is all together.
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It's a lot easier to figure out how to take e-mails across current and
last generation systems and current and last generation mail clients
than it is to try and bridge a 15 year old machine that ran from 5
1/2" floppies using some nasty proprietary mail format and modern
floppyless OS using some nasty proprietary mail format.
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Decoy Email Addresses to Train Bayesian Spam Filters |
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Bah, blacklists are for wimps :-)
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What you want to do is use it as training data for your bayesian filter [nuclearelephant.com], so your filter not only blacklists the email address, it learns more of the spammer's
armoury.
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- And as you *know* it's going to be spam, you can run it through half a dozen times marked as
spam.
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Do
Your Own Email Redirect |
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To get around spam issues I bought a cheap domain and use an included service to redirect all the email that gets sent to that domain to a single email address. (Most will offer this service for free.)
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I then use separate email addresses for everything I sign up for. E.g. my bank email address is different from my health fund email address, which is different from my all of mp3 email address etc. I use a little code which isn't
obvious (similar to a lookup table) to code each website into the username portion of the email address... That's why I'm a little annoyed at allofmp3.com at the moment, as I've supplied two email addresses to them on only two
occasions, and both are huge spam recipients. So it's clear that not only does their financial arm sell my email address, but their online store does too.
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This method is good for 2 reasons: It's very easy to direct all email from particular addresses straight to the trash should they become spam targets and secondly, it's very easy for me to figure out (such as the allofmp3.com case) who sold my email address to spammers and when.
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DVD
Archive |
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I archive all my pr0n on DVDs these days. It's really
easy and oh wait... fsck!
- Save it all. With the exception of some mail
archives lost to catastrophic disk failures (I keep archives for my
own convenience, not for any official purposes, so I don't back them
up), I keep all my email.
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Thunderbird is able to import all my old mail archives (from years and
years of Eudora) and search it effectively. If I were inclined to
export all my archives from my Mac to my Windows machine, I could use
Google Desktop Search to really search through it all.
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Email
List Poisoning |
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- So you forgot to exclude the poison page in robots.txt... Keep in mind that legit bots (like Google) will obey robot exclusion rules and spambots will ignore them.
- Try Robots.txt? There might be a possibility that spambots may follow it to avoid wpoison, but there's a much bigger chance they won't care.
Sample Robots.txt for a spamtrap located in your.site.here/users.php.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /users.php
Disallow: /users.php/
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Email Obfuscator |
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I try to run any mailtos through an email obfuscator [seowebsitepromotion.com] .. as the link says, a 6 month study [cdt.org] showed that obfuscated emails "do not receive junk mail."
My theory is that harvesters have enough email addresses out there to gather and that the spammers are too lazy/have no need to write algorithms that interpret these types of
mailtos.
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Email Server Sends
Reqest Back To Email Address in Header |
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When the mail server gets an incoming email, it sends a request back to the "sending" email server listed in the headers. Since most spam is sent with falsified headers, the reply from the "sending" email server will respond that no mail was sent. Then my host mail server simply dev/nulls the spam. In the case of real mail, the sending server responds that it did indeed send the mail and my host then delivers it.
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The only troubles I've run into are servers that don't support "sender verify". If the email doesn't get a verification message, its returned to the sender.
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Oddly enough, of the servers I've found that don't support "sender verify" they have been IIS servers. While there are still other IIS servers that do support it, I find it interesting that most of the servers not running IIS seem to have this feature turned on.
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The nice thing about it is 90% of the spam never reaches a mailbox, and the filters from Spam Assassin catch the rest. This also removes the image only
spam.
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Forward to Yahoo or
Gmail |
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I also have email archives that stretch back to the
early-1990s. I pretty much still have every email I've ever sent or
received. When upgrading email clients, I often migrate my archives
with me, converting them using whatever client's built-in importing
and exporting functions I have available.
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I went from Eudora to
Outlook Express to Thunderbird to Mac Mail. I also have programs that
"pop" webmail off their sites (gmail, hotmail and yahoo) to
consolidate them in whatever current mail client I'm using. I just
keep them in neat folders ("Old Eudora Mail," "Old
Yahoo Mail").
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Hidden
fake email addresses in white |
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- I wonder if you could take that one step farther: If everyone with a web site published 1000 bogus e-mail addresses (in tiny white-on-white font) for each real one on their site, perhaps the wasted time/effort of spamming all the bogus addresses would reduce the number of spams hitting legit e-mail addresses, and also reduce the cost-effectiveness of spamming?
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