Email forwarding to spam filter

[Auntie Helen]

Hello everyone,

I have an email address which I have used for 16 years and everything is on it.

It is now getting lots of spam.

For some reason I no longer get bills to pay for it, so don’t want to wake the sleeping lion by asking to turn on spam filtering. I might have to start paying for it again then!!!

What I could do is change the email address to a forwarder which is a spam catcher. Outgoing emails could then still be sent from my normal address.

Can anyone recommend such a spam-trap?

[Greenbank]

For some reason I no longer get bills to pay for it, so don’t want to wake the sleeping lion by asking to turn on spam filtering. I might have to start paying for it again then!!!

A friend used to gloat about something similar, then his access suddenly disappeared as the company responsible had folded with no way of getting his email back. Changing emails linked to accounts is very tricky when you've absolutely no access to that account any more.

Personally I'd wake the sleeping lion and ask. It may be that part of the service you were paying for was spam filtering.

[drossall]

I'm not sure that I completely understand. Do you mean that auntiehelen@sleepinglion.com can be either a normal address or a forwarding address, and if the latter then anti-spam is turned on automatically? It would just be a pain I think, if you had to use one account to read mail and another to send.

A lot of older addresses were intended for what we used to call offline readers (OLRs), or in more modern terms for you to connect with an email client (e.g. Outlook), and download mail, rather than to use as Webmail. I still do that. One of the side-effects is that, when you do get around to signing in to Webmail, you find that they've added new features and controls that you didn't know about. Is there any chance you could just sign in and turn on anti-spam?

I've got a Compuserve account that I've had since the early 90s. That too was originally paid, but now (owned by AOL) is free.

[vorsprung]

move sleepinglion.com dns to google
use gmail
end of problem

[drossall]

Only if Auntie Helen controls the DNS? I invented sleepinglion.com, obviously. If it's really majorisp.com, they aren't going to be happy if their DNS moves

[vorsprung]

Only if Auntie Helen controls the DNS? I invented sleepinglion.com, obviously. If it's really majorisp.com, they aren't going to be happy if their DNS moves

Right, I entirely agree
The spam filtering on google mail is pretty good though

[Auntie Helen]

I have the ability to set my current address as a forwarder and I am just experimenting with forwarding to gmail. This seems to be catching spam.

I am able to set the ‘sent from’ address to my old non-gmail address on the gmail web page but not sure about the app.

The sleeping lion of an ISP is actually a friend of my late father, who did a small number of email accounts as a favour to him I think. I used to pay 60 GBP per year but they could never give me standing order info (I had to write a cheque!!!) and I haven’t done it since I moved away from Colchester (the lady went to my church there).

The mailbox space is small and spam filtering was never switched on, so it’s not the best option. But it is a domain (my surname) I have had for a looooong time so I want to keep it.

[Kim]

The problem with gmail's spam filtering is that it tends towards the false-positives.  I'd much rather delete a couple of obvious phishes and herbal viagra spams a day than have legitimate mail vanish because of their fanatical devotion to DKIM and DMARC.

[Auntie Helen]

That’s how it used to be for me but I’m getting 30 a day now.
partly as a result of having such an old email address which was included in several data breaches.

[pcolbeck]

If you own the domain name then just sign up for an Email service that supports you using your own domain name and has decent spam filtering then change you MX records to point at that. Download all you old emails before changing the MX records though.

I think Gmail supports this and Fastmail (fastmail.com) definitely does as do loads of others. I have used fastmail for over ten years and its rock solid with both IMAP and its web interface, not free though but not expensive.

[Greenbank]

My main email address I've had since 1998. It's been in a few data breaches (dropbox is the main one, any others are obscure).

I currently have no spam filtering on it at all and, looking in the deleted messages folder (everything non-spam is filed), I'm currently getting 30 a day. That level I'm happy to manage myself. At some points this drops to almost 0 a day for a few weeks but then inevitably starts up again.

Once it did get much higher (>100/day) and I was planning on writing my own spam filter that will access the mailbox by IMAP and pick out spam based on various things, but at 30 a day it doesn't bother me enough to do that.

Getting my email off my phone (I can still access it via the webmail interface is absolutely required) was one of the best things I've done. Stops me being a slave to my phone so much.

[Mrs Pingu]

move sleepinglion.com dns to google
use gmail
end of problem

This is sort of what we did, except we set sleepinglion to autofwd to google, I think, and then collect the email from gmail.

[Morat]

The problem with gmail's spam filtering is that it tends towards the false-positives.  I'd much rather delete a couple of obvious phishes and herbal viagra spams a day than have legitimate mail vanish because of their fanatical devotion to DKIM and DMARC.

I've set up DKIM and DMARC on our work email (just monitoring mode) it is pretty fierce isn't it!

[Ian H]

I've found gmail pretty good, with not too many false positives.  Thunderbird as a client has its own trainable spam filter which isn't bad, but not as efficient as gmail.

[Kim]

IMHO "not too many" = 0

Thunderbollocks's filtering isn't bad for a basic Bayesian filter, but the effectiveness of that approach depends on the nature of the email you receive.  Some legitimate mail can look awfully spammy.

I'm currently running a combination of spamassassin and clamav with the foxhole database, which rejects^[1] the overwhelming majority of crap at SMTP-time.  Effective, but involved a non-trivial amount of work.  But so did jumping through the hoops to satisfy gmail's policies.  It's effectively a conspiracy to turn email into a walled-garden by making life hard for the small players, in the name of user convenience.  Nothing good can come of it.


_{[1] The advantage of this approach is that the sender at least gets an error message, rather than the mail being silently delivered to your spam bucket.}

[Auntie Helen]

Gmail is working well for me, although it has 1-2 false positives a day (I am training it).

I forward all my own domains emails to Gmail and only look at Gmail when our and about. Once or twice a day I go through the emails on my own domain to see if there were any I didn’t get from Gmail. This means I don’t get spam emails sent to my smart watch every fifteen minutes so I am happy with it.

[Mr Larrington]

Quite often Thunderbum decides a message is spam.  I tell Thunderbum it isn't.  "Oh, right" says Thunderbum, moves it back to the Inbox and then immediately decides it's spam again.  And it thinks everything from any band's mailing list ever is a scam, and refuses to be told otherwise.  The only^* thing in its favour is that it's not from Microsith.

* well, perhaps not the only thing...

[Kim]

Hmm, does forwarding break DKIM?  I suppose it depends on whether the headers get modified...

[drossall]

Which depends how you forward. There's some arcane stuff about "Sent on behalf of..." that I haven't quite got my head around. I use "bounce-forwarding" quite a bit.

[Afasoas]

Hmm, does forwarding break DKIM?  I suppose it depends on whether the headers get modified...

Yes.
Unless the sender is re-writtern.
Hence postsrsd is a thing.