[jheckmann]

Has anyone else noticed a sudden increase in spam?

I did set ALL the spam filters on, it had no effect.

For the past week or two, I'm getting more spam on my aplus.net accounts than on my Yahoo email.

[seanp_aplus]

If you are getting increased spam, you may want to look into 2 different things here. First, if you already turned on your spam filters, you may want to increase the level of security to one step higher. Also, the other thing, you may want to look into is creating an spf record. This can lessen the spam message you get with the email account with aplus.net. The spf record is not guaranteed to wipe out spam, but most likely would lessen it. You can do a search online to find out information on how to create an spf record and once you have it, please contact our support, either by calling or live chat and we can put that into your DNS information.

This information should assist you with lessen your spam in your account.

If you have any other questions about your account, please feel free to give us a call or hop on live chat.

[jheckmann]

"you may want to increase the level of security to one step higher"

Where? There's nothing like this in webmail options.

"You can do a search online to find out information on how to create an spf record"

OK, I have 35 yrs in IT, and this is way over my head. The Wikipedia article on SPF lost me. I don't even understand how to use the SPF setup wizard at openspf.org. It all looks like it has to do with SENDING spam. I want to prevent RECEIVING it. I just don't get it!

[bruce_in_ma]

Over the last many months I have received more and more Spam Emails.
I am too very frustrated. I am a 30+ IT engineer.
What I have been doing over the last 4 to 5 months, is to report all Spams to SpamCop, without opening any Spam Emails. But it seems the more I reported to SpamCop the more junk i got.
I have had the same Email account for more than 15 years, and it has never been this bad. Actually for the last 10 years I have had no junk Email, except for the last half year, where for every month it has almost doubled.
I even have a, more or less, junk Email account with Juno, where certain web site force you to give them a Email address. But the Juno account has way less junk then my Aplus account.
I too have turned ever Spam filter on the web account, without mush difference. If i raise the Spam filter number it does a horrible job of filtering, where legitimate Emails get removed as well as Spam, and only some Spam, so that is not much help either.
I am not sure how to stem the title wave of Spam. One way is to shoot down my current Email address that I have had for 15 years, but I prefer if there was a way (or Aplus ) to block or even better shut down the Spammers. BTW I too have not heard about a SPF record.

[jheckmann]

Bruce,

The aplus.net knowledge base says they'll install a generic SPF record for you if you request it (why didn't their answer here include that information?), so I did. I haven't heard if it was done, and I don't know how to check to see if it's there.

Regardless - it only prevents spammers from using your domain in spam that they send. A good thing but it hardly addresses the problem.

http://blog.systemcoder.com/2007/02/...f-records.html

And if SPF records are such a good thing, and aplus.net can create generic ones for us, why don't they do that across the board??

A lot of what I'm seeing uses a well-known automated spam emailer tool:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat!

It seems that many ISPs automatically filter email with this tool in the X-mailer header. Maybe aplus.net doesn't, or stopped doing so.

The filters aplus.net provides seem to have the worst approach, basically what you described for SpamCop: wait for customers to report spam, add those sources to a list, distribute the lists, have admins install the lists. So you're always behind the curve. Something like SpamAssassin, if it were installed for us on our mailboxes, might shorten the cycle but is still reactive.

This is far more than I as a customer should have to know, IMO. Aplus.net's system admins and support people need to *earn* their salaries.

Joanne

[bruce_in_ma]

First of all the Spam has become worse sins the original post - a lot worse. So I clicked on support, logged in and wrote a Email to A+ in there Web Email tool.
But after waiting 2 months, A+ support has not written back, not even an acknowledgment, where one gets ones Email back as a copy, with something about that "we have received your problem and we will get back to you shortly." Nothing!!
Why have a web service if A+ is not going to respond to it?

[bruce_in_ma]

Update to previous statement.
I did get hold of Aplus Support.
They did install SPF records, BTW it is not that straight forward how to create a SPF file, but more importantly, it does nothing to bring down the SPAM level (been trying it for about a month).
The Aplus support said, that SPF has more to do with SMTP (sending Email) than receiving Email.
So again I am faced with a load of SPAM, and not much Aplus support want to do to reduce that.
The weird thing is, my JUNO account has way less Spam and I use JUNO to sign up for stuff, that generally creates more junk.
One would think Aplus has the capacity to do the same as Juno.
Aplus best suggestion: Set up a new Email account and get rid of the old one
Easier said than done.

[jheckmann]

Here are the titles and content of the spam just this afternoon. This is with the "spam filter" turned on and set to "enhanced", the max setting available - these just passed through without going to the junk folder. As you can see, much of it links back to the same url. This stuff has been filling my inbox for weeks now. Why is it still getting through? Is aplus.net just not updating their filters often enough?



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