Fight the Evil

Spam and pop-ups

from JoeUser Forums

Steven den Beste of USS Clueless just posted an entry about the tools he uses to control his internet browsing and spam email. I use K9 for email spam catching (based on an earlier recommendation from him). It works quite well for DW, who gets two orders of magnitude more spam than I do (she gets spam on the order of 10^4 since she cleared stats, I get it on the order of 10^2 since I cleared stats - both at roughly the same time). Because I get so little spam, though, K9 has some issues - it only catches around 25% of my incoming spam. Since I get maybe one or two leakers a day, it is not a big deal - DW gets the same number of leakers a week on a vastly larger email volume. And I could tune it via blacklist/whitelist rules to be better, but it'd be a large effort for marginal gains.

Don't let this dissuade you from getting it, though. It works most remarkably, especially since I don't mark every bit of commercial email spam (there are some vendors I like hearing from via email) so certain commercial keywords aren't getting flagged. And it works almost perfectly on sexually-themed spam, even for me. It doesn't start working immediately; there's a learning process (a short one). But it does work, and work well. I'm just lucky to have not gotten my email onto spammers' lists. And I haven't yet had a false positive from it, and DW only had .3%

As for pop-up blocking, I've looked at the proxy filters, and decided I can't be bothered to set them up. What I use for pop-up blocking is Google's Googlebar. It only works for IE (there I go, losing a chunk of the audience), and its primary task is to give you quick access to Google. It's an IE toolbar that gives you a text entry block, a selection of search types, and other options. It works like the Google main site. Secondary functions include pop-up window eating (it's a tad overprotective, it'll get false positives - but the windows are still available, you just have to click on an icon in the status bar) and "autofill". This is a feature that detects fields on a form such as name, address, email, etc, and with one button push will fill them in with information you provide. It also can do the same (with password protection) for credit card info, but I haven't used that feature, since my wallet is usually near at hand, and I don't do that much web shopping. The Google toolbar can be found at http://toolbar.google.com/
28,068 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
From what I've seen of the IE Google Toolbar, it has nothing on the unofficial Googlebar for Mozilla browsers. I particularly like that you can navigate to the next search result without going back to the search page, and can set it to hi-lite your search terms. The only thing it lacks is pop-up blocking, but only because Mozilla has that built in.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
For that matter, I find Mozilla's spam blocking to be superior. Just tell it to dump junk mail into the junk folder. After a few days of "wearing in" while you catch the ones it didn't, it does an excellent job. I have found that it will generate false positives if you are on a mailing list though. Either a manual filter or a few days of "training" by checking up behind it, and it's good to go.
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
You really should take a look at Proxomitron. It is rather easy to set up. The biggest headache I had was getting MS Messenger to work with it. I watched the log file when messenger started and set it up to allow the server MS Mess wanted. In particular I like JD's filters. They are written to be easily understood by newbs like me. My favorite part is "no more obnoxious blinking ads".

You can find JD's filters here.
http://www.jd5000.net/
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
I really don't have a problem with pop-ups. And since I use Outlook for e-mail (I also use it for PIM stuff with my PDA, and take precautions against malicious e-mail), I'm not terribly interested in other email packages and their functionality. IF there's a googlebar for Mozilla, perhaps I'll try it - tabbed browsing sounds nifty. But I would still need something to autofill forms in Mozilla - that's actually a feature I use a fair bit.

The reason I don't use proxomitron is because between the pop-up blocking in the googlebar, and the adblocking in spybot, it does what I need, and doesn't force me to configure anything.

And before anyone goes off on how dangerous it is to run outlook, I have an up-to-date antiviral package, don't use preview panes, and don't open attachmetns unless I know the sender and am expecting an attachment. And I keep up on my security patches.