[LargeFormat] Getting Rid of the Spam Messages

[Alan Davenport]

This may be a bit off topic, but then again perhaps not.

I see that some spams are still coming through on occasion, you know, the ones
with the random letters for a sender's name, that will send your browser 
straight
to internet hell.  Not as many as there were, but still a pain.  I took a 
look at
them to try to learn not where they were coming from, but where they were 
trying
to take the unfortunate viewer.  It seems they are ALL directed toward a 
set of
domain names that are subsidiary to an outfit called Freeservers.com ... 
and they
appear to be an automated scheme to generate traffic to web pages that earn 
someone
a little money for every advertising popup that is accessed through the pages.

THEY CAN BE EASILY FILTERED OUT.

One caveat:  you must assume that no person you would want to correspond with,
would stoop low enough to put a page on servers that allow such crap.  This
because the filtering is rather drastic.  You're going to throw away any 
message
that mentions the offending domain names.  If you've already figured this one
out, ignore this message because you'll never see it; it mentions all of them!

That said, here's how to do it...

1. Create a filter (or filters) that look at the BODY of every message

2. The filters are looking for messages that contain any one of the 15 (or so)
domain names that Freeservers.com uses.  Those names are:

8k.com
8k.net
8m.com
4t.com
4mg.com
s5.com
gq.nu
itgo.com
iwarp.com
tvheaven.com
freehosting.net
htmlplanet.com
scriptmania.com
faithweb.com
freeservers.com


3. Set up the filter(s) so any message that contains ANY OF THOSE NAMES
goes straight into the trash.  My filters also mark the messages as "read"
so my trashcan doesn't look like there's something worth seeing in there.

I've had these filters running for a couple of weeks now, have had a fair
number of spams trapped and tossed out, had ZERO of the offending messages
get through.

It's possible that Freeservers will add more domain names later on, so if
new ones start leaking through the filters you'll have to add more names
to the list.  If you go to http://www.freeservers.com you can see the list
of domain names in their form that will sign you up for their "services."