Spam Overload

For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.

I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...

Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.

Comments

[Arjun Taheem]

Is it possible for the uni to transfer there email system to Gmail? I think De montford do that and googles Spam filter is top notch. I rarely recieve spam to my inbox and I love the fact that it can import accounts from hotmail. Its like a good version of outlook on the cloud. Although I still need to try out the Office 365 stuff which may include a better version of outlook i cant remember...

[Rob]

I do get less (but not no) spam on my Gmail account. Most of my spam comes via an old alias at the BCS which spammers seem to have latched onto. This gets redirected through the uni account.