Episode: 548
Title: HPR0548: How to Prevent Spam
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0548/hpr0548.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:51:48

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Welcome to Hack of 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 anymore.
They're just useless.
I actually 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.
We're 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 the mail is set through Gmail.
I set up a few email addresses, I explained two different ways doing it, the way I do it
in 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 actually
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, a dear, a hull, a hull, a hull,
don't know, how are you, if you want an effective future increase of money and pat on the
back, smiley face, question mark, special offer, we can give you a diploma, blah, blah,
blah, and this is actually been picked up by spam, so by Gmail, but it's from apparently
Sheila Webb, HMSVB at usco, USSco.com, probably faked, I mean there's no real need, you know,
they actually have a number one three oh one, one three oh one three nine six three five
oh six, interesting, but there we go, but it's sent to T.A.G.U.J.I. 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
still got a bit of a cough, so yeah T.A.G.U.J.I.U.J.I.I, no idea, sounds Japanese, but 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 forwarded spam, so straight away I don't need to wait through all these things,
I don't have it all going to my real email address in case it doesn't get picked up by filters,
I don't need to worry about it, so that's the first thing, oh there's one in Russian, no idea what
the hell it is, it's 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 to, 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 positive if
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 going
to get picked up, I mean someone could you know type your 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 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 going
to 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 set 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 dreamhost or anything at dreamhost.com
don't know 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 gold 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 the 99.99% of your spam to basically just go and you say you don't have to worry about
it, so that's the main one, I should probably explain spam gold may, excuse me again, so spam
gourmet.com, I believe it is, yes spam gourmet.com that's trying to remember my fanatic
alphabet, Sierra, Papa, Alpha, Mike, Golf, Oscar, Uniform, Romeo, Mike, Echo, Tango, at
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 a 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 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 the 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 x-ray oscarkeloco.oscaromeo golf,
you can send me feedback through there, or you can email me at zoke.org at gmail.com,
that's x-ray oscarkeloco.oscaromeo uniform at gmail.com.