Check out google groups archive. Use keywords Swen, virus, and spam. You'll find a
lot of lamenting about all this. Swen (news) hammered people with unmuged
addresses with huundreds of spams per hour. My address was in the clear for a few
posts after reinstaling Gravity news reader and I started with 90 per day which rapidly
went down to about 4 and then to a few a week.

I was suggesting bouncing the spams with MailWasher www.mailwasher.net . I still
use it to preview mails, and delete them, but I found out that bouncing is not always a
good thing to do because the from line is forged in many spams and someone who
never sent the spam could get a flood of bounce messages.

I set this account up with my ISP for PICList only because it exceeded my disposible
account's max bandwith - 10MB / mo.  www.sneakemail.net . Notice that subscribe
confirmation messages from PICList have a sneakemail address. I used one for
yahoo groubs, also. I may just do it with USENet since I'd write my spambot to
remove munges, were I to write one. I use a separate sneakemail for other things
like registrations.

That way you know the source of the spam. Almost immediately after changing to
this address and posting to PICList, I started getting porn spam. I don't get it with my
primary ISP acount (remember this is an ISP account, also,) but that may be due to
other things like maybe their spam filter isn't set up on this account or as someone
else mentioned, a hack or an insider. Or maybe not.

MSN is a non-starter. Sign up for that passport and be ready to delete all your mail. I
have a yahoo account  I never check, but a few days after signing up, no spam.

I think Mailwasher and sneakemail are two of the best solutions. Only problem is
those spams with no unsubscibe links and with forged return addresses. I've been
reading up at abuse.net about how to handle that. It's reminded me that there's a
little routing info in the header and IIRC from past research, you can add custom
headers, but one level of originating domain or other is always going to be there, so
you can fwd the spam wiith your complaint there and I you can register with
abuse.net to FWD it through them. They route it according to a database they have.

BRs
mike

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