One born every minute!
 

Does anyone else here get regular emails from "Bernard Wood"? They always contain a link to something that I absolutely must read!

No. I dodged a lot of that stuff for my wife, when she had to identify herself to Apple. Advertising is age related. So I gave her the oldest birthday the system would allow, which was 1886:-). She gets little crap now. Train your spam filter to reject that sender, and unsubscribe if they give you a link, which they should do.

Many years ago, I got incessant 'lengthen/expand your (obviously tiny) dick' spam. I set up
1. Vipul's razor (was free to linux users), which caught about 50% of them. It was based on user feedback 'this checksum is spam.'
2. DCC = Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse, which checksummed each mail and reported it. When the same checksum came in too often, it was bulk mail, therefore spam.
3. Spamassassin with extended rulesets. Rules are like fashions, their utility fades as spam adapts.

By tweaking the spamassassin and DCC scores, I could catch ~102% of spam, which was ok. I'd check the spam once a week or so. That was actually about 4% false triggers, and the odd spam mail coming in, usually one or two liners with a url.

I don't bother with filters. They're too much trouble to set up. I can see what is or is not spam pretty well by eye. It's different obviously when you're setting up a system for someone else who isn't Internet-savvy.

I get those penis-lengthening offers too. Too bad they're no use to me!

I found them @$*€! offensive. I didn't want to have to consider them. Maybe that implies something about the size/length of the one I have - I'll leave that to the imagination. I was on an electronic hardware mailing list then (late 90s/early 00s) and needed to be to do my job; They were often sent to the list, and many got through. There was a spamassassin filter about 'Created by Microsoft Frontpage' and that caught loads of spam.

I only get spam at home as often toxic paper and ads (4th-ish email in life now)( DON'T GIVE IT OUT, we can have more than one) the mail-carrier* breaks* their* back* for that and no unsubscribe‽ :cry:

i moved to a new country, and had little or no electronic/bureaucratic ties to carry over.
that meant practically no spam for me in the first decade or so, electronic or paper. it slowly starts trickling now.

but i also take care where i give my email address to.
but even those addresses reserved for problematic stuff don't get spam.
either their filters are quitely being effective, or i must be doing something right.

i also regularly give fantasy names, sexes and birthdates.
i pity those who feel compelled to be "truthful" in these situations.


come on, it's 2017! EVERYTHING is possible!
:D

That is a point. If you change email, tell your contacts, don't tell your spammers, you lose them. I have found it necessary to keep the old one open for a while because the Android OS makes it inconvenient to not have a gmail or googlemail account. I'm with mail.com under several tildes. This one is linuxmail.org. I have one for private, personal, electronic, & linux stuff. Spam is very low.