emails from unknown senders ....

[Jim Becker]

Some new bot-nets came online recently and the uptick of nefarious, attachment laden emails (many of them with CryptoLock type treats), has bee huge. Don't open them for sure.

[Dennis Peacock]

There is a drastic climb in effort via email for phishing attacks to gather more current info for valid accounts. Do NOT click on "unsubscribe" in most cases due to this only confirming a valid and working email address. I operate on the rule that if I don't know you and I'm not expecting an email from you? The message gets deleted. Plain and simple.

[Tony Zona]

I started blocking IP ranges. Surprisingly, US servers are the worst... they're set up as bots and spam the crap out of folks. When I started blocking certain ranges (CA and NJ hold two of my worst offenders), the spam dropped from 100s/day to a handful/month.

Dan,

What OS do you use, what mail app, and how do you determine and then block IPs?

I have opened the mail to find IPs. Is that what you do?

[Curt Harms]

I use Thunderbird as an email client. Both it and Firefox will, when hovering over a link, show the url associated with the link without activating anything. We then forward anything claiming to be from Chase, Bank of America, Verizon or whoever to their email abuse/fraud address. I often add a note about it being too bad that a Fortune 100 company can't afford their own email service but must use one in Russia, Eastern Europe or China.

[Brian Elfert]

Our corporate email server includes a subscription to a continuously updated list of bad IPs. At least two thirds of all of all of our email comes from IPs on that list. Those emails are immediately rejected.

[Dan Hintz]

Dan,

What OS do you use, what mail app, and how do you determine and then block IPs?

I have opened the mail to find IPs. Is that what you do?

All blocking is done at the ISP level... since my mail comes in through my web hosting service, I merely set up a list that does not allow those IPs access. If someone were to surf to my website using one of those IPs, they would get a "cannot connect to website" error. Mail from those IPs gets bounced back as if my server doesn't exist, so they can't even collect my emails as being active just from not getting bounced back.

As new junk mail gets through, I look at the originating IP and add it to the list. As I said, I'm down to a few junk emails/month. It is probably the lowest level I've seen since setting up my website 10 years ago.

[Chuck Wintle]

There is a drastic climb in effort via email for phishing attacks to gather more current info for valid accounts. Do NOT click on "unsubscribe" in most cases due to this only confirming a valid and working email address. I operate on the rule that if I don't know you and I'm not expecting an email from you? The message gets deleted. Plain and simple.

I use thunderbird email client and it seems to work well after it has been "trained" to reject bad/suspect email. I never see the email as it goes automatically into the junk folder which empties when thunderbird is closed. My rule of thumb is to delete any email that is requesting info. If you think an account has some kind of issue then login in via the normal method and see.

[Dan Hintz]

I use thunderbird email client and it seems to work well after it has been "trained" to reject bad/suspect email.

I totally disagree... I love TB (what I use), but it's quite dumb in its methods of junk mail detection. Its basically using "same email" and "same image" detection. If you want even remotely useful detection/rejection, you have to spend a lot of time writing rules that look for specific titles, body text, etc. A properly built Bayesian filter would be 100x better, but for whatever reason they refuse to include one.

[Chuck Wintle]

its a consumer grade email client but for my needs it works well.

[Bill Cunningham]

I block all of those New top level domains. I.e. .top,.xyz,.download,. Etc. There must be a hundred of them an all I have ever got from any of them is spam

[Dan Hintz]

I block all of those New top level domains. I.e. .top,.xyz,.download,. Etc. There must be a hundred of them an all I have ever got from any of them is spam

Interesting... don't think I've received a single spam message from any of them yet. Everything comes from a .com.