Tap, tap, tap, is this working???

Allison wrote: What is bizarre is that one email address that posts to the list is getting lots of spam and another email address that also posts to the list is not. What is also bizarre is that your spam stops when you unsubscribe from the list (if that is what you mean by "stopping this net" and "bailed from the list" above). In my experience, once a spammer finds an email address, they don't bother to check whether the address is still active any time they want to send spam to it. They just keep on sending irregardless. I think you are jumping to conclusions here. In my experience, spammers are very lazy people and they are just not willing to put in that sort of effort. Unless the spams you are getting are very specifically designed for you, I would discount this theory. I'm a mere blow in that hasn't been here more than 25 years. I worked for an email provider for 15 years and for the first 5 years of that, email spam didn't really exist (unless you count the "call for papers" type of academic spam). After that, I put a lot of work into understanding spam and preventing it from getting to or from our customers. It is really really difficult to come up with a useful filtering system that can recognise and stop spam without stopping good mail too. The only ones I use are DNS based lists of ip addresses which are known sources of spam, such as those operated by Spamhaus. I also use my own homegrown ip lists. This approach works for me because I have my own mail server. If you are stuck with using a commercial email provider, you are stuck with what they are using. Many commercial providers won't even reveal what they are using. As for the free email providers, forget it. The ip address based filtering I use stopped just one spam going to my cctalk mailbox since April 2019 (there was a spate of it in April). Filtering is never a complete solution. The best way to avoid spam is to avoid having email addresses harvested but this is not always possible when people we correspond with unwittingly get their machines compromised. Another thing I believe makes a difference is to complain about every single spam received to the ip provider of the spammer or the compromised machine used to send the spam. Nobody else I know is willing to put the effort into doing this though. However, nobody else I know has as good a legitimate mail to spam mail ratio as I do either. (Obviously this approach can not help when already getting too much spam to cope with.) Regards, Peter Coghlan.