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1. 

   Richard Francis

   March 24, 2008

   Easter Monday – couldn’t sleep – sniffing around while I could be doing php exercises.

   I did a project on spam for NET593, the conclusion of which was ‘live with it’, we are faced with, and deal with, unsolicited advertising in other media and even driving down the street. My advice being to people I see fretting over spam, get all your security in place and accept that occasionally you’ll have to hit the delete button to dispose of the Russian brides and gigantic penises.

   One thing I have observed is that your choice of server is critical. I get a small amount of spam through the OASIS mail and since my curtin email address is never publicised, the spammers have found my address through Curtin rather than at my end.

   For the last couple of years I have had two email addresses using aapt.net.au as my ISP. The volume of spam that built up on both of those mail accounts was quite huge, perhaps up to ten a day at times, thankfully mostly filtered by Apple’s mail program. As aapt’s service declined and the wait on the phone became longer and longer only to get dodgy advice from a manual (like ‘buy a new modem’), I switched to internode.on.net in Adelaide, and hey presto no spam (touch silicon).

   Internode isn’t cheap but the service is impressive, they either have much better spam filtering or better security. One of the two email addresses wasn’t publicised yet the spam rolled in, matching spams in both boxes. So the leak was at the ISP end, not through anything I was doing.

   I also recall high levels of spam in the dark days of trying to deal with Telstra Big Pong as an ISP.

   So it seems to me your choice of ISP does have a bearing on the amount of spam received. Your advice re using a php form (as I do) is wise, but I don’t think using a graphic is, as the email address remains behind the graphic in the html code.

   Richard