Episode: 600
Title: HPR0600: Handling spam
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0600/hpr0600.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:43:57

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Mm.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio, my name is Soak, so I don't want to talk about spam.
This is just going to be a very quick one, how I try and handle some of my spam.
First up, hotmail sucks for spam, I've had a hotmail account for years, I really don't
use it any more, they're just useless, I just set up one single rule that said if it
was an email from anyone that wasn't sent to me directly, then mark it as spam, and
that actually worked a lot better for catching all the spams, then hotmail filtering.
Got a Gmail account many years ago, and that wasn't much better, I've actually amazed
by how fantastic Google is for sorting out spam, not going to sit and argue about issues
for them, stealing all your personal data and stuff, talked to 330 if you want specifics
about that, but so this is how I tend to set up, so I have Zogelorg which is mail is set
through Gmail, I set up a few email addresses, I explained two different ways doing it,
the way I do it, an alternate way, very similar, but dependent on how your email is set
up, you may be able to do one or the other, I may only be able to do one or the other,
so you have one email address set up, and that's your real email address as it were, and
then you have other ones, another one which I call spam at Zogelorg, where anything that
doesn't go to an email address gets sent there, first of all that should remove most of
the spam, because spam has sent things, I mean let's look at some of the spam I have
here, one here, two busy to go back to school for a suitable life, a Ford, Adia, a hull,
a hull, don't know, how are you, you want an effective future increase of money and
pat on the backs, myleface, question mark, special offer, we can give you a diploma
blah blah blah, and this is actually been picked up by spam, by Gmail, but it's from apparently
Sheila Webb, HMS VB at usco, USSco.com, probably faked, I mean there's no real need, they
actually have a number, 1301, 1301, 396, 3506, interesting, but there we go, but it's sent
to THUJI at Zogelorg, now that's not a real email address, I've never had that, I've never
set up anywhere, they're obviously just randomly putting words in front of domains, apologies,
trying to get over a cold and I still got a bit of a cough, so yeah, THUJI also, I know
no idea, sounds Japanese, but I haven't got a clue, so any Japanese listeners, can you tell
me if that's actually a sort of regular name, like a John Smith or something or whatever
anyway, so that because it's not going to an email address I've set up gets Forded spam,
so straight away I don't need to wade through all these things, I don't have it all going
to my real email address and in case it doesn't get picked up by filters, I don't need to worry
about it, so that's the first thing, well there's one in Russian, no idea what the hell it is,
probably selling something, anyway, so this is the first thing, you separate this out, so anything
that's sent to a non-real address is sent one way, obviously you can still go and check it,
but you don't need, you can check it once a week or whatever, or once a month dependent on how
often your spam folder is cleared out, just check there's no false positives, false positives,
if you don't know how to explain this, if you've got someone's arrested because they think they
did a crime, you think they did a crime, if they're actually innocent that's a false positive,
if you've arrested the guy, please innocent, a false negative is you think the guy's innocent,
but he's actually guilty, so you know, in this case it's spam, that's not a problem, but if there
was something that sent through to you that wasn't spam, but your spam folder thought it was,
it's gonna get picked up, I mean someone could, you know, type a new name or something, and it ends
up into the spam place, now obviously then spam filters will then pick up and try and organize,
so that should make your life a lot easier, but this is trying to make it a lot simpler, I mean,
I really do get 400, 500 spam emails a day through to Zodoro and 99% of them instantly get picked up,
because they're not to a real email address, in fact probably more than that, most pretty much all of them do,
then after you've done that, what you want to do, if you want to limit this bit more,
if you want to give your email address out to someone, but you're not quite sure if they're gonna be
nice, like let's say dream host, never use dream host, so I'm just randomly picking them,
but let's say they were not very nice and they sold your email address, what you could do is you could
block them by giving them a fake email address you don't care about, but then that's kind of
awkward because you've got a different email address to worry about, so what you could do here is
you could sell up a dream host or DH at Zodoro or something, again, it's not a really email address,
I don't use dream host, so you set up a DH at Zodoro, until dream host, this is my email address,
you then go into your filters and you say if it's from support at dream host or anything at dreamhost.com
let it through otherwise, forward it off to spam at Zodoro, because that way if they sell your email
address, you do not care because they won't be sending the email, someone else will, and then it's
instantly thrown away into spam at Zodoro, you can even say market a spam or however you want
to do this, I'll let you play around with the filters and stuff yourself, and so with these two
techniques which I tend to use more of the first one, I have other ways of doing, I have other
ways using spam, or may actually to use for email addresses, I think people are going to sell,
but using this you can actually set it up and try and basically get rid of most of your spam,
I mean you want 99.99% of your spam to basically just go and say you don't have to worry about it,
so that's the main one, I should probably explain spam gourmet, but excuse me again,
so spam gourmet.com, I believe it is, yeah spam gourmet.com, that's trying to remember my
fanatic alphabet, Sierra, Papa, Alpha, Mike, Golf, Oscar, Uniform, Romeo, Mike, Echo, Tango,
at .com, so spam gourmet.com, and you set up an account there which is free, and they actually
have the source I believe, last I checked you could do it, but they'll give you, so you set up an
account, let's say Bob, and then you have Bob at spam gourmet.com, but what you do is you add extra
bits in the front, so you can have, going back to the dream host, you could say dh.20.Bob at spam
gourmet.com, the 20 says I want 20 emails and then ditch everything, so dh to the front just
reminds you of the dream host, and this way you can set up multiple different accounts, so I tend to
have that first to try and, if I want, throw away email accounts, that I probably won't ever
want again, but may do because you can go back in and change the number of remaining emails,
so I'll use that for that for sort of throw away email addresses, and then anything else
I'll try and pick up through creating these fake email addresses and bouncing sort of a
cyclic loop. The idea from all of this I should point out was, I can't remember actually who did
it, it was like a bin rev, and someone was talking about how to filter emails and have two different
email addresses, one for important stuff and have it emailed to your phone or text, to your phone
to say hey it's important, and I really can't remember who did that now, but that was basically where I
got the idea from this, and I've kind of tweaked it a little, because well I don't have a cell phone,
I'm actually the, I think last person on the planet not to own a cell phone,
so I have no need for it to be texted to me, I have no need for any of this stuff to be forwarded,
so I didn't use any of that, but I thought it's a cool idea, sort of splitting, segmenting,
email out. So, no, that's basically it, hopefully that's useful,
if not tough, go make an episode yourself, something you would find useful,
but yeah, hopefully that's useful for everyone, and that's about it, thank you for listening,
if you want to give me any feedback, you can go to zoke.org, that's xrate oscarciloecco.oscaromeo golf,
you can send me feedback through there, or you can email me at zoxoroatgmail.com,
that's xrate oscarciloeccocieraoscaromeo uniform at gmail.com.
