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SPAM reaching epidemic proportions

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Carol Haynes:
There is a pretty simple solution to avoid that - use a different email address for every contact - then you find out how the idiots and b******s are.

You can do this quite easily with Yahoo and others by using the anonymous email address generator. You still get all your mail in one place but you at least know which email address has been used.

My problem (the multiple 'carol' problem) is that when I signed up for my current ISP I had spam in my inbox when I opened it for the first time !! OK I know you say I should change ISP but I am happy with the service they provide in terms of internet access and mostly I do my own thing with email but it is  annoying.

nudone:
i must say i like the idea about having a different email address for every contact - i might try it - something like just appending the initials of the individual onto the address (or the initials of the service/company).

superticker:
I presume I can use:

--- --- carol.*(carol)+.* for 2 or more occurrences of the string?
-Carol Haynes (June 16, 2006, 03:00 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, but if you apply that to your entire header, your ISP only has to mention Carol twice to flag the message.  Be sure to tell MailWasher to search only the To: and cc: lines, not the entire message header.

Another, less efficient approach would be to have the regex check for To: or cc: at the beginning of the line when searching the entire message header.  You need to terminate the search.  I used an end-of-line $ meta character, but using something like ^Subject: would be better since a long To: or cc: line may wrap before reaching the next Carol occurrence.

--- --- ^(To|cc): .*carol.*(carol)+.*$

superticker:
There is a pretty simple solution to avoid that - use a different email address for every contact - then you find out who the idiots ... are.

You can do this quite easily with Yahoo and others by using the anonymous email address generator, [and] still get all your mail in one place ...-Carol Haynes (June 16, 2006, 03:12 AM)
--- End quote ---
Spamgourmet is the best proxy service for temporary e-mail addresses.  You can let these tmp addresses automatically expire based on frequency of usage or by expiration date.  You can also define allowed senders and sender domains for each tmp e-mail address that won't count against their expiration frequency.  Moreover, you can make your tmp addresses up on the fly without ever re-visiting the Spamgourmet site.  http://www.spamgourmet.com/

All the features are a little complicated to figure out at first, but you can start using it with the most basic features right away.  It's open source, so DonationCoder could setup their own spamgourmet service.  :)

My problem ... is ... I had spam in my inbox when I opened it for the first time !!-Carol Haynes (June 16, 2006, 03:12 AM)
--- End quote ---
Geesh, you really need to change your name.  :P

Carol Haynes:
Yes, I suppose I should have signed up with something so obscure that no spam list would want to attack it - you live and learn! It's dead simple though with Mailwasher just bin any email that has 2 or more carol's in the CC field and I don't see them at all! (So long as I don't get loads of friends called Carol or mailing lists - but then I am not using that email address any more except for a couple of subscriptions and ISP related service mail).

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