OT: Drastic drop in spam at AT&T

drop in spam. From 80-100 a day to 5-10. I

nothing. No rants or rumors on the web either

anywhere.

Schools out? All those zombie PC's are turned off?

Cheers

No, must be something like ISP filtering, I've got the usual > 100 spam eMails per day today.

Yeah, I am wondering. What concerns me is that many "professional" spam filters are not particularly smart. For example T-Online in Germany once took the liberty to filter out the whole SBC domain. Got some pretty frentic help calls from Germany because that had cut some folks off from their business partners in California. I guess about a third of the companies out here might be on that domain.

Anyhow, it would not be cool if some of my biz contacts wouldn't be able to get email through. I still have a fax but many companies don't (they should).

I've been using AT&T Business Internet (for email, not usually connection) for a long time. I haven't noticed any reduction in spam, perhaps a little more. I still get between 500 and 700 a day. Most are pretty easy to filter though, since AT&T flags them as "potential spam".

My UK ISP, Demon has an opt in spam filter system that was previously Brightmail (and it did make a difference but was nothing to write home about). The last 3 months they have switched to Cloudmark and that has proved incredibly good. A few mailing lists occassionally triggered false positives early on but they are now sorted. I was sceptical at first but it is that good.

Roughly 100-500x decrease in spam volume per day for me. And it has now been tuned so that even the Rockphish bank scam emails do not get through now (UK based ones seemed not to be noticed by US vendors default settings).

If you have a filters configuration page it would be worth checking. The spam is still out there. But my secondary filters no longer have to work hard as I get only a handful of junk through now.

I expect the spammers to respond with counter measures but for now all quiet on the western front...

Regards, Martin Brown

drop in spam. From 80-100 a day to 5-10. I am on

No rants or rumors on the web either which I'd

anywhere.

Did you notice how the "cheap-loans" spam almost vanished? I guess the current credit crisis had something to do with it, everything is good for something :)

I did notice my mailguard (Bellsouth spam blocker) has had a lot less garbage since AT&T took over. I did have some connect problems a few weeks ago, but they have seemed to have solved that problem Frank in Raleigh NC

drastic drop in spam. From 80-100 a day to 5-10. I am on

nothing. No rants or rumors on the web either which I'd

anywhere.

I'm still getting ads for no-doc or "stated income" mortgages. Just for giggles I looked up their interest rate. The premium for not reporting income is only 1/4%.

Frank Buss snipped-for-privacy@frank-buss.de posted to sci.electronics.design:

I have sbcglobal and my spam has dropped off. Still too much getting through. I will be retraining their filters some more.

I would wonder about legit emails getting stalled too, Joerg. It seems AT&T Worldnet dorks around with their service quite a bit, and some of that upsets (some people's) applecart.

About 4 years ago the daily spam level on my AT&T account reached ~180. Unacceptable. I poked around Member Services and stumbled on Parental Control, whereby only mail from specific, user-defined addys ever reaches Inbox. Super! I set up my account with Parental Control and everything was fine, not even 1 spam thereafter. But then last summer I needed to send/receive mail from a guy in UK and another who uses an account at CERN (Switzerland). Suddenly I couldn't log into Parental Controls to add those two addresses. Customer Support didn't have a clue, insisted that nothing on their end had changed. I insisted that nothing on my end had changed. We spent the next two weeks dorking with this problem, to no avail. I abandoned the AT&T email, went with web-based mail.

And another, though related, problem with AT&T: they "enabled" the UK and CERN addresses for me, since I couldn't do it, but though this opened the line from my UK colleague, the path to me from CERN didn't work. Why? Because many spammers send their mails using forged CERN addresses, and so AT&T, in its infinite wisdom, blocks mails from CERN as a matter of course!! AT&T should stick to telephone and telegraph.

I want to abandon AT&T but haven't decided on a (wideband) ISP to replace it with.