The large majority of Internet users HATE SPAM, but the government has done almost nothing to stop the garbage that clogs many mailboxes every morning. A rather simple solution would be to establish a "NO SPAM" list similiar to the telemarketing NO CALL list and then penalize the benefactors of the SPAM. Our government seems to have more important things to do than to worry about SPAM.
There are/have been mulitple approaches to try to slow SPAM and the effects of all the junk floating around the Internet. Some seem to work well while others are more trouble than they are worth. More than once, I have received email from someone inquiring about an item for sale either here or on ebay and then forget to add my email address to their friends list. It can be very frustrating to try to answer an email and find that you cannot communicate with that user because their SPAM software is working toooo well.
Between having this web site and selling on ebay, I am bombarded with all kinds of STUPID emails. After trying a number of approaches, I found and am using a tool called mailwasher. You might immediately ask what it is that I like about this tool more than other ones. For many years, I operated on a dial-up line. I did NOT want to download any files that were not needed, particularly when many of them were large SPAM files.
Mailwasher brings a summary of the emails from your server into your computer, shows who sent it, the title line, time it was sent, and size of the email. You can also display the message header and the first part of the email without loading the entire email. After reviewing the sender and title line, you have the option of deleting the email without ever downloading it onto your system. The option that I like best is if the email is SPAM, you can bounce it, sending it back to the sender if it has a valid return email address. You also have the option of adding a sender to either a friends or blacklist so that if you receive another email from that same sender, mailwasher remembers which class it fits.
When an email is bounced, it appears to the sender that the email was sent to an invalid email address. If the SPAMMer is looking at the email, they will realize that the email address that they have sent to is not a valid email address, as far as they can tell. [In many cases, it is believed that the SPAMMers don't look or care about bounced emails.]
You can include multiple email addresses in mailwasher and then sort the input by time of arrival or by the various email addresses.
I realize that this is not going to stop SPAM, but it feels great to return the SPAM to the sender. The downside of the program is that if a friend sends an email and either doesn't include something in the subject line that looks like it's a real email, you may well bounce email that you don't want to.
If this approach interests you, then take a look at
Mailwasher from firetrust that
I use.
I love returning the SPAM to the sender. They deserve it!!!!!