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Sympatico & spam

3K views 16 replies 9 participants last post by  Gene B 
#1 ·
I've been on Sympatico Highspeed for just over two years and have been quite satisfied with the service. However, In the last couple of months the amount of spam has gone up considerably. I used to get one or two a week but now it's like five to ten a day.

If I recall correctly, Sympatico has spam filtering built in, so why did I get an email several weeks ago about upgrading to a higher level of Sympatico that would include better spam filtering. Very poor customer service if you ask me.
 
#2 ·
akaM, I have Sympatico Warp 3 from Aliant here in St.John's, and I have noticed I have gone up from zero unwanted spam messages to two or three a day. Thus, I too have seen an increase in the past couple of months.
 
#3 ·
That's odd, I too am with Sympatico highspeed and I get the once a month news letter in my E-mail account. Over the years I have learned one thing, in order to get rid of spam, watch how you distribute your E-mail address. I never get spam anymore. I only receive E-mail from those people who have my E-mail address and that's it. That has been my case with Rogers and Sympatico. Years ago I had a Hotmail account which Microsoft proposed to fill with all kinds of spam from every direction possible. I ended up sending it all back to Microsoft and they shut my account down :D If anyone was to spam me again, they are only opening the gates for me to flood them with tons of spam of their own.
 
#4 ·
U_L, strange, but only 7 people know my Sympatico email account address, since I use this for private messages to my wife and six close friends. I can't see how anyone got my email account address.
 
#5 ·
Dr. G,

Have you ever filled out any forms? given away your E-mail addy on a survey? Gave it to the bank? Credit card company etc...? Maybe a web contest? Have your friends sent you one of those E-mails that was sent to like 30 people? you know the ones where you see like 10-30 different E-mail addy's at the top from the sender? That is another way that people get your E-mail addy. At work it only took one person to use the companies E-mail addy at a contest site, and voila we now receive E-mail from all over the place. We are constantly fighting the numerous spam of E-mails we receive each day. Although I'm hard at work of getting rid of them and being succesfull, it only took that one E-mail and we were flooded.
 
#6 ·
People.. don't complain with my ISP in Gaspe I got on average around 200 plus SPAM a day and most of those were automatically generated lists. I would not complain about spam till it hits at least a 100 a day. Right now, even .Mac is getting spam that has been auto-generated. It is part of the internet, and you will always get spam at one time or another.

Cheers,

RtC

P.S. Right now, I get about 10 to 30 a day, and they are peeled off my the Junk Mail filter in Mail.app without a problem.
 
#7 ·
Much as I like OS X's Mail program, I'm a dedicated Eudora user. A few weeks ago I upgraded to version 6.0, which now comes with a spam filter.

That, applied on top of the Chebucto Community Net's server-side spam filtering, mean my junk mail content has gone dramatically (ballpark 95%).

There has got to be a way to get those b%^&*ds. I mean, if they're selling you something, then there must be a way to track them, right? Of course, I recall an article from a few weeks ago about a U.S. senate task force that was hung up on the "definition of junk mail". Hmph! Guess a few representatives of the people have their hands on the spam-generation button themselves, eh?

:mad:
M
 
#9 ·
I'm on Sympatico high speed and the spam I get really isn't because I did register a couple of products and booked a hotel room over the internet.

But OS X's mail program puts the junk right in the junk folder. I take a look when there's a few in there, just in case, as a friend with a yahoo.ca account got flagged as spam a couple of times. Fixed it by adding her to my address book.

But no 'real' spam here.

John
 
#10 ·
U_L, I have given out my email address to my wife and six close friends who email me via that account. I use my MUN email address for ehMac and EVERYTHING else. The MUN system has a spam filter that identifies spam and will someday filter it out. It takes me less than a minute to delete all of that identified spam, which is not much, but it now is up to about 5 minutes a day on my MUN account. That is a great deal of spam, but listening to RtC, I guess I am lucky.
 
#11 ·
UNB also has a huge problem with SPAM and SPAM filtering. If the spam filter is in place, some of the good stuff gets taken off, and when the SPAM filter is not there, well my UNB account used to be packed full of stuff.

Alas, Spam is here to stay.. well, until laws are passed against it, they should do like Cali and fine someone for unsolicited mail.

RtC
 
#12 ·
There is next to nothing that you can do about spam. Although not on Symp Hi Speed, out of no where I got hit: one of my Rogers accts is basically dead - I mean has been hit with the spamius bacterium. I don't even check it anymore. I get the odd time that I may d/l the mail to EntX by mistake, but that email is done. Not sure where it came from, but it happened so suddenly... scary. It's like mercy killing..
 
#14 ·
Saint Mary's university in Halifax isn't even considering applying a server-side filtering mechanism, since, in the words of one of their techs, "there are professors who do research on subjects that would likely get caught by the spam filter".

Now, while I'm sure there may be a researcher who's into goats and bondage or whatever, I find it curious that a university with an entire IT department is unable to implement what a bunch of overworked volunteers at the community net managed to do in a few short weeks: implement an Opt-In spam filtering system that is simplicity itself.

It all just comes down to two things: political will and inertia.

:rolleyes:
M.
 
#17 ·
Maybe the Sympatico spam filter is just a spam magnet. It sure seems to work that way. Obvious spam is not stopped. If it's that messed up maybe legit email is being filtered. Anyway Sympatico sure seems to avoid any discussion about it. Also they make it very inconvenient to report to them any spam that gets through their filter. Or is it that it is not Mac friendlysite?
 
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