I want to use my main mail address everywhere, even public places. But I doubt if I can guard myself against spam.
Is there a provider specialized in spam protection? Or at least good at it?
At last, given your experience, should I even do it?
I want to use my main mail address everywhere, even public places.
No you don’t. It’s not quite as simple, but buy your own domain, get an email provider such as Fastmail that will let you use a catch-all, then use a unique address for every site you visit.
Then if one starts receiving spam, you can block that specific address and voila, no more spam. Plus you know what sites have either poor customer detail hygiene or are actively selling your details.
I own my domain but I’m not sure about provider. I want to use “name@surname.net” on my public profiles so unique mails for services trick wouldn’t work for me.
Then you’re going to get spammed to hell, live with it.
There’s no spam filters that will protect you 100% from putting the same email address everywhere.
Using personalized aliases for everything and never showing a public address if you can help it is the only way to fight spam these days.
I know it’s “big evil corporate overlord”, but Gmail is pretty damned good at it, really.
If I get spam from a company I recognize I gave my email to, I’ll go in it and click the unsubscribe button and do it that way. Anyone else and I just mark it as spam and Gmail does a pretty good job of sending swaths of junk emails into the spam folder. I don’t get much that slips through. Very occasionally I’ll sign up for something I’m supposed to get an email for but don’t, and I’ll find it in the spam folder. If I think I’ll want more emails from that company, I move it to my regular folder.
There’s a large org (@ hope.net) that has a non-profit convention every few years. It maintains a e-mail list to let its > 1000 previous attendees know about the upcoming convention and related info. In the past decades everything was fine.
This year (con in July) Gmail has been spam-binning ALL of those reminder e-mails aimed at attendees who use Gmail. Quite clearly it’s not the users making that choice. The org is left with no other way to contact those attendees.
Then my guess is that someone got ahold of that email list and started using it to send spam and that caused Gmails algorithm to start flagging anything sent out to a bunch of members of that email group at the same time as such.
Most spam i get is from a random @gmail address as source, can’t be that great. And they are shit with attachements.
Tell us you don’t understand how the “From” header works without telling us.
FYI, that is really just a text string. Most providers don’t let you change it, but its not exactly hard to falsify. People are largely ignorant of the fact that email mostly isnt trustworthy. Spammers abuse this ignorance constantly.
In order to send email as another address, gmail requires you to verify the address by sending you an email there first. AFAIK, they never re-verify, but that’s the main weakness I see.
I created an email provider called Port87 that specializes in spam prevention, phishing prevention, and organization.
You use it by giving a labeled address to all your accounts, so to Netflix, you would give something like yourname-netflix@port87.com. Then that becomes a label in your account that you can set quick settings for like mark as read or even just block that address if you’re done with it. And if you get something claiming to be from your bank there, you know it’s phishing.
Then you can have labels that are meant for real people like yourname-friends@port87.com, and when someone emails them for the first time it will email them back and ask them to verify they’re human.
And your bare address (yourname@port87.com) doesn’t go through, but rather responds with a list of your “public label” addresses. So that one you can share all over the internet and you won’t get spammed.
Ok but you can do this with aliases with any decent email service.
I guess an aliasing service like yours can be useful if you’re stuck with a bad email provider, but since OP is looking to set things up they can just pick a decent one to begin with.
Ok but you can do this with aliases with any decent email service.
As far as I know, there’s no email provider that lets you choose to enable sender screening on individual aliases. I also don’t know of any that explicitly do not use the bare address.
You can kind of achieve the same thing with Sieve scripts and a catch-all address (which is how I developed the prototype), but there is a lot that Port87 does automatically that you’d have to do manually in that system.
For example, you don’t need to set up a label before you use it with Port87. You can just give out a yourname-whatever@port87.com address and it will create the whatever label for you. These labels show up in your “Pending Labels” section. You can then approve them to move them into your regular labels, block them, or just let them expire.
I wrote this service around this concept, so it’s not like you’re using a regular email system a special way. The system is designed and built to be used this way.
Sounds like you have qmail at the root. I ran that with spamassassin, barracuda and some other custom rules for years. Didn’t add on the auto response you have described, but really liked it back in the day.
Did I guess kinda close to what you have running?
I’d think the annoying part would be that you’ve forced the work to prove they are human back on the sender. Might be a good way to go though given how much spam there is.
It’s actually built on Haraka. All of the queueing is custom written so I can do things like make it a flip of a toggle whether you want push notifications, sender screening, mark as read, etc. for a label. And there’s no inbox, since the bare address is not a usable address. Every email you receive already has at least one label.
The paid proton accounts let you use several custom domains, although I’m not sure if you can combine custom domains with email aliases. For random sites the email alias with the stand @proton.me would probably suit your needs.
After about 3 years of use I’ve been very happy with proton’s spam filtering.
I use proton coupled with my own domain and SimpleLogin (which is now merged with Proton) to create infinite custom email addresses in my domain. I then use filters to move the recipient address to folders and I can turn off one of my SL addresses if it’s compromised or sold and create a new one.
OP: Asks about spam filtering
Lemmy: Recommends everything but spam filtering
