Get Spamnet for $1.99 a Month - But Not Until Tomorrow...?!

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cloudmark.com/spamnet' target='_blank'>http://www.cloudmark.com/spamnet</a><br /><br /></div>If you recall a <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11733">recent discussion we had about spam</a>, you'll know I'm a huge fan of Cloudmark Spamnet. I just signed up for their pay service last night, and was surprised to see that as a beta tester I was able to get the service for $1.99 a month instead of the normal $4.99 a month. I was willing to pay $5 a month for Spamnet, because I find it so useful in keeping spam away from me, but at $1.99 it's a no-brainer!<br /><br />Cloudmark has a referral code service whereby if you <a href="http://www.cloudmark.com/spamnet">download the client</a>, install it, and click on the My Spamnet menu option inside Outlook, you'll get a chance to sign up for $1.99 a month for a year. When you get to that stage, use my referral code: RZ05HL. When you do so, you'll get the reduced price, and I'll get a free month. We both win. :-)<br /><br /><b>UPDATE:</b> It turns out that the codes won't be active until TOMORROW, so you won't see the $1.99 discount appearing until then. My apologies - Cloudmark, if you're reading, <b>DON'T</b> send out offers that don't <b>WORK</b>! :really mad:

[yada88]

Is this a limited time offer?

[Jason Dunn]

Is this a limited time offer?

I'm not sure - I don't think so, because when they were explaining the referral code, they didn't say there was an expiry date on it. :D

[malcolmsharp]

I actually just bragged to my Mom about my current spam solution...

My old e-mail address was way too full of spam. I've had it for years, and wasn't careful with it. So I got a domain name so I could have my own mail address.

But I still wanted to use my old mail address. But even with come complicated outlook filtering, it still was an issue and I didn't look forward to going though my mail.

Solution... I set up outlook to ONLY check my primary mail address. I use a free e-mail program (Eudora) to check my other account. But I also use PopFile ( http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ ), a free perl program that uses the training concept to filter mail, to classify it all. It also gives me stats that lets me see that 60% of the mail I get there is spam. Yikes! (to be fair, I've moved most of my important stuff to my new account)

[js]

Is this a limited time offer?

I'm not sure - I don't think so, because when they were explaining the referral code, they didn't say there was an expiry date on it. :D

Looks like a great addition to fight SPAM!!!

I opened up My SpamNet and it is showing a subscription price of $3.99/Month with the $4.99 crossed off.....where is the $1.99 option?

[butch]

Now that I've give Jason a free month, some of you should use my referral code insteed! 9Y05HL
Thanks :)

[Jason Dunn]

I opened up My SpamNet and it is showing a subscription price of $3.99/Month with the $4.99 crossed off.....where is the $1.99 option?

I think you only get that when you put in the referral code I gave above.

[sponge]

I wouldn't pay $5 for Spamnet. Just not worth it. I prefer to use Spammunition, a FREE bayesian spam filter which has barely missed a mail so far, over 1000 spams caught. I used Spamnet and SpamAssassin on my server, and it didn't catch as much.

It's only problem is that you have to keep the spams in your spam folder, because it creates the list from start everytime.. but that should be fixed in the next version.

[JI3ird]

Jason you need to change the title on your story. I did what you said and all I get is

Your credit card has been charged $ 3.99 for your first month of spam protection. You will be charged this amount, per month, hereafter to continue your subscription to the SpamNet service.

I used your refrence code so you have a free month, but by the way I figure it you owe me $2/month. Please I will accept Visa, Master Card, or PayPal. :)

[caywen]

All,

I contacted Cloudmark and inquired about the customer codes. They say that the referral code discount will not be active until tomorrow 10am PST and so it will be best to wait until then to give Jason his free months :-)

[Jason Dunn]

Jason you need to change the title on your story. I did what you said and all I get is: "Your credit card has been charged $ 3.99 for your first month of spam protection. You will be charged this amount, per month, hereafter to continue your subscription to the SpamNet service." I used your refrence code so you have a free month, but by the way I figure it you owe me $2/month. Please I will accept Visa, Master Card, or PayPal. :)

AUUUGH!!! Crap. Sorry. I'll go upstairs and sign up on my wife's computer with my code and see exactly what happens....I don't understand why it's doing this. :evil:

[Jason Dunn]

I contacted Cloudmark and inquired about the customer codes. They say that the referral code discount will not be active until tomorrow 10am PST and so it will be best to wait until then to give Jason his free months :-)

Are you serious? :roll: HOLY @#(@*#)@#! How stupid can Cloudmark possibly be, making an offer that does't actually WORK yet. GRRR. :evil:

Thanks for the clarification, I've updated my post. Sorry for the mix-up people....who knew? :oops:

[Cloudmark Cust. Service]

I'm sorry the SpamNet referral code is not working properly for you today. A bug that affects a small group of people was discovered that will be resolved by tomorrow. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

If you continue to have problems, please seek help on the Cloudmark website.

http://www.cloudmark.com/support/spamnet/

Cloudmark Customer Service

[ChrisW]

I also use PopFile ( http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ ), a free perl program that uses the training concept to filter mail, to classify it all. It also gives me stats that lets me see that 60% of the mail I get there is spam.

I've used POPFile for almost 6 months, and it does a great job. Since February, 66% of my email is spam. Of 7,700 messages in that time period, it's only gotten 95 of them wrong. 8O

Cloudmark doesn't work so well for me, since one man's spam is another man's newsletter. I tried it for a while, but there's a genealogy newsletter I get daily from Ancestry.com. Every day Cloudmark would file this as spam, and every day I'd have to go to the spam folder to fish it out (and this wasn't the only thing that it habitually handled wrong). This ruined the whole thing.

Bayesian analysis, which POPFile uses, learns MY definition of spam. 8)

[bradolson]

My solution for spam: get your own domain name. Whenever you need an e-mail address, use the sitename or some other characteristic. For example, your order something from Amazon.com, use e-mail [email protected]. Do the same for any site you do business with or share an e-mail address with (forums, etc...). Have all the addresses forwarded to one account. If you get spam, look at who the message was addressed to, and that will tell you where the spammers got your address from - then just disable that alias and you stop the spam. How to do this varies with what hosting provider you use. It works. I've been doing this for about 3 years now with great success. Between doing this and using a modified hosts file on my PC, spam, pop-ups and web page advertisements are all but gone - with no 3rd part apps needed.

If you have any questions about how to do this, e-mail me at [email protected].

Brad

[redbike2001]

I have used Spamnet for about a year and have been pleased...but not thrilled. I am still getting several pieces of Spam that it does not catch. There was a great article recently in one of the PC mags about anti-spam programs. They were hyping Qurb (www.qurb.com). It uses a different approach. It scans your saved mail, sent mail, and e-mail addresses that are in your directory. It only allows mail to be received from those sources. The others are put in "quarantine". You then have the ability to "approve" the quarantined mail that you want and thereby adding the address to your approved list.

The cost is $24.95 and it comes with a full feature free trial. I have had it for a week. I get ZERO Spam in my inbox. I have approved maybe 2-3 e-mails a day that got tagged. That number gets to be less and lesss everyday. They are both good products that take different approaches.

[Jason Dunn]

Cloudmark doesn't work so well for me, since one man's spam is another man's newsletter. I tried it for a while, but there's a genealogy newsletter I get daily from Ancestry.com. Every day Cloudmark would file this as spam, and every day I'd have to go to the spam folder to fish it out (and this wasn't the only thing that it habitually handled wrong). This ruined the whole thing.

Something was wrong then - the past few versions have had a feature where, when you click UNBLOCK more than once, it automatically adds it to your whitelist and it will never be blocked again...

[wastl]

I should get an FREE account for the next 5 years!!!

I emailed Jason about Cloudmark and put him on to Spamnet and by publishing it here on his website; consequently 100's of people are using it now.

Good for you Jason that you like it!

Cheers from Aussieland

Stefan

[JeZaD]

I was pretty disgusted to hear that Spamnet was now going to be a "service" you have to pay for. After all, it is the USERS that essentially do the donkey work for Cloudmark.

It is in the telecommunications companies' interests to remove spam from the net, thereby reducing their own bandwidth/costs. In my opionion they should really be putting forward the money for the infrastructure necessary for the running of such a service. Alternatively Universities should host the required services - I'm sure the telecommunications Cos would fund the sums required (not huge).

Goodbye Spamnet. Was/is a fantastic idea, but this should be public domain folks...

(The servers were awfully slow anyway)

[retlaw]

I don't know about all of your anti-spam solutions, but I think this screen shot of mail account statisics says it all for the product I'm using:

http://www.ipermitmail.com/about/statsbig.html

100% spam free!!

[kevinsb1]

What did they change pricing last minute? :(
## From their web site ##
SpamNet 1.0 - The highly anticipated final version of SpamNet is now available. To celebrate its availability and as a thank you to our SpamFighters, the more than 400,000 beta users can lock in a special promotional subscription price of $3.99 a month and save $1 a month for a year's time. New users can try SpamNet FREE for 30-days and then pay only $4.99 a month to experience the spam protection trusted by hundreds of thousands. As a subscriber, you receive product updates, new features and functionality and customer support all for a small monthly subscription price that is about the price of a latte a month. Don't just protect yourself, protect your friends and family and the world from spam by joining the largest spamfighting community. To subscribe to SpamNet, select My SpamNet from the SpamNet toolbar pull-down menu. For more information about this important release, please see the press release.

[Jason Dunn]

I was pretty disgusted to hear that Spamnet was now going to be a "service" you have to pay for. After all, it is the USERS that essentially do the donkey work for Cloudmark.

Really? You run their entire server farm? You do the development work on their clients? You fix bugs? You answer questions in their forums? You generate free electricity and heat for them?

Wow - you're one busy guy! :lol:

The bottom line for me is that it's a service that helps me control email spam, and that's worth a few bucks a month to me. Free services have a nasty habit of just going "poof" and going away - free services aren't very sustainable as a business, which is something anyone should realize from the past several years. :|

[Jason Dunn]

They were hyping Qurb (www.qurb.com). It uses a different approach. It scans your saved mail, sent mail, and e-mail addresses that are in your directory. It only allows mail to be received from those sources. The others are put in "quarantine". You then have the ability to "approve" the quarantined mail that you want and thereby adding the address to your approved list.

That sounds interesting, and I'm glad it works for you, but there's a big flaw that makes it unworkable for me: I get a lot of email, daily, from people whom I don't know and who are not in my address book. One of the things I've disliked about almost every spam blocking program out there is that I have to go through a folder, look for the "good" stuff, etc. That takes time I simply don't have.

But I'm glad you found a solution that works for you! :mrgreen:

[bostonnerd]

For a somewhat different approach to Spam control, take a look at Messagefire (www.messagefire.com). It uses a proprietary method of analyzing forged message headers. No rules, and it's not permission based. It traps about 30 Spams a day for me with about 99% accuracy. The site is in Beta and I believe they are still soliciting free Beta participants.

[Jason Dunn]

For a somewhat different approach to Spam control, take a look at Messagefire (www.messagefire.com). It uses a proprietary method of analyzing forged message headers. No rules, and it's not permission based. It traps about 30 Spams a day for me with about 99% accuracy. The site is in Beta and I believe they are still soliciting free Beta participants.

Hmm - that looks quite interesting...they're analyzing the header and doing a reverse lookup on the mail server. Very innovative, although it won't stop spam coming from real mail servers in placed like Russia and India, where money is more important than stopping the spam.

[bostonnerd]

[quote=bostonnerd] Very innovative, although it won't stop spam coming from real mail servers in placed like Russia and India, where money is more important than stopping the spam.

You can block by country as well....gr. It does a very good job of tracing country of origin.

[Jason Dunn]

For a somewhat different approach to Spam control, take a look at Messagefire (www.messagefire.com). It uses a proprietary method of analyzing forged message headers. No rules, and it's not permission based. It traps about 30 Spams a day for me with about 99% accuracy. The site is in Beta and I believe they are still soliciting free Beta participants.

Ok, I just tried out their online trial. Out of 20 messages that were waiting in my Inbox, it caught all the spam, but it also flagged 10 legitimate messages as spam. 8O I know it says it will get "better" once I register, but man, that's a horrible demo! I'm suddenly not so keen to try it.

[Jason Dunn]

I also use PopFile ( http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ ), a free perl program that uses the training concept to filter mail, to classify it all. It also gives me stats that lets me see that 60% of the mail I get there is spam.

I've used POPFile for almost 6 months, and it does a great job. Since February, 66% of my email is spam. Of 7,700 messages in that time period, it's only gotten 95 of them wrong. 8O

Ok, I've installed PopFile, and no offense to the programmer, but like most SourceForge projects it's too geeky even for me. The documentation stops right where I need it to answer the question of "what next!" :|

I've got it running, my email is filtering through it, but how the heck do I tell it what's spam? I've set up two buckets, one for my personal email and one for my pocketpcthoughts email. Email comes in, and it's listed on the history page. I have the option there of changing the classification from "un-classified" to one of my two buckets, or removing it.

Where are the big buttons that say SPAM or NOT SPAM? Why do I have to tell it which bucket it belongs in when it came in through two different email accounts already? There's no way I have the time to classify every email message that comes in.... 8O

You guys are telling me this is good, and I want to see for myself, but I'm really unimpressed so far. I'm missing something here... :mrgreen:

[JeZaD]

You didn't read all of my mail, did you Jason. Oh well, I'll just go back to running the server farm, writing the clients, paying for the electricity :)

Next time I write some software for someone I'll tell them I charge nothing for it, then build in a time-bomb that asks for money after 9 months. They'll love me for it.

Anyway, who pays $4.99 for a latte????? That must be a lot of latte. You're all way too rich :)

Okok, I'm ready to pay $1.99.

[mterlouw]

I understand that this is an unrealistic solution for most, but the best solution I've found is Bogofilter (http://bogofilter.sf.net). It is under constant development to keep up with the tricks spammers use to get around the more powerful filters, and is very accurate with an extremely low rate of false positives (I have never received a false positive, even during training).