In the context of this article, "recover" means "make usable again". It’s probably true that there’s more than a few of you out there who have an email address that you’d like to use again but can’t because it’s completely overrun with spam.
Yes, it is possible to recover an email address ruined by spam. The only prerequisite is that the existing email account must be accessible via POP.
Method 1. Using a webmail provider as a spam filter
Three of the easiest free webmail providers to use as a spam filter are Gmail, Hotmail and AOL. You could use Yahoo! Mail, but they charge for POP access. Using your preferred choice of webmail, sign up for a new email account. Then configure the account to import email via POP from the existing spam-ruined account. The webmail provider should be able to catch the vast majority of the spam that comes through, and in addition you can send mail out as that email address if you like from the webmail provider.
If you prefer to use a mail client, that’s not a problem. Each of the webmail providers above provides free POP access. Two of them (Gmail and AOL) provide free IMAP.
Method 2. Mozilla Thunderbird 2 + ThunderBayes
Thunderbird does have built-in spam filtering using Bayesian filters, however when it comes to email accounts that get absolutely clobbered with spam, it’s simply not good enough. An alternative junk filtering system is ThunderBayes. This is a better filtering system that really gets the job done.
Thunderbird 2 is still available for download here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/latest-2.0/ Simply pick your platform (most likely win32) and then your localization (for USA it’s en-US).
ThunderBayes can be downloaded here: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ Yes, it is true there are versions for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird 3, but I haven’t tested those personally.
My spam experiment with TB2 and ThunderBayes
I own a dot-com domain that gets mountains of spam if I use a generic webmaster@example.com catch-all account (meaning [anything]@example.com will go to that one address). I figured that would be a really good test to see if TB+TBayes would actually work.
The TBayes setup was really easy because of its tight integration into the Thunderbird client:
TBayes simply adds in an additional area where mail is checked upon arrival. It has both ‘spam’ and ‘ham’ (for email you actually want) settings, and once running is completely automatic. No fuss, no muss; it’s a simple easy setup.
Upon activating the email address, the account immediately started getting bombarded with spam. ThunderBayes only required a very short ‘training’ period, and it was then catching spam far better than TB’s standard filter ever would.
This is how much spam I received in less than 24 hours:
Yes, that is only the Junk folder. Now you know what I mean by "mountains of spam".
TBayes was able to correctly identify 99% of the spam that came through, so it’s safe to say that yes, it definitely works.
What really impressed me more than anything else is that I purposely set up the mail to be delivered from the server completely unfiltered – and TBayes was catching spam left and right in fine style.
Initially, TBayes is very aggressive, but that’s okay because you want it to be. Once you start marking mail you want to receive as ‘ham’, TBayes obeys this without issue and the mail you want to get to your inbox actually does get there.
Yes, a spam-ruined email address can be saved!
Whether you choose to go the webmail-filter way or the TB+TBayes way, both work quite well. Personally I prefer the mail client way of doing it, however you may find the webmail way easier to deal with.
I was successfully able to recover an email address that receives 2,000+ spams daily, so no matter how ruined-by-spam you think a particular email address you have is, believe me, it can be made usable again.
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I would like a return to sender option so the spam senders box gets stuffed! Would it work?
I think it would make them “flame” you with more spam since it would confirm that the account is actively watched by someone. I would try to set it up to forward all spam to spam@uce.gov. IMO doing this will eventually slow it down but will never make it go away 100% and it happens slowly too. I have been doing this for the past year or so and it seems to work.
I will use this program
Cool stuff dude! Thanks for the post!
Thanks for the info; it was useful for one of my family members who has this problem. I, on the other hand, don’t have problems with spam. I let my email filter them and it works like a charm. I’m very fastidious about which sites I visit, what links I click on and have always been very mindful of the inherent properties of such an open social tool such as the “Internet”; I’ve been using it since the early days of “gopher”, “archie”, “ftp”, etc. I had to get a hotmail email account last year (for win32 xp pc) and recently it was hijacked. Everyone in my address book is being sent spam using my hotmail account. The only advice I can find to fix this problem is to shut it down and open a new one. Really? Is there no way to save it? I’m normally on my linux systems and don’t have as much knowledge of win32 xp but there’s got to be a better way. Can anyone help?