How to make spam useless

Ferro219 · May 2014

Gold spam works, because no matter how many people report a spammer, the messages remains visible. Here's a simple solution if a person gets reported by several people:
- Automatically remove all mails sent by the spammer, so people who have not yet opened them, or have been offline won't even know they received a spam mail.
- In case of chat (usually zone) spam, send a signal to all clients to remove the reported spam message from all chat logs.

If people can't read the spam messages, it becomes pointless to send them in the first place.

GM's still need to review each case to make sure it was a genuine report.

AlexDougherty · May 2014

Labour intensive.

Oh I agree with you in principle, it's just that there will be thousands of these Spems every day (possibly every hour) and monitoring them would take a large team.

So I doubt it's practical on that basis alone, nevermind the legal quagmire of reading other people mails (EU law as well USA remember).

Daelun · May 2014

"Automatically remove all mails sent by the spammer, so people who have not yet opened them, or have been offline won't even know they received a spam mail."

And how do you propose that the server is to detect whether mail is spam or not? As someone that has been supporting real mail servers for over a decade I can tell you that there are processes like grey listing and white listing that are the most powerful tools for stopping spam and even these are not sufficient on a fully locked down POP3/SMTP server. What you are proposing is not possible without tons of legitimate emails being automatically deleted as well. Automation is not the solution here.

Rocksteady · May 2014

I decided to give WoW a try awhile back and was plagued by /tells(/whispers?) from gold sellers and the like. Then I noticed there was an option I could toggle on and off to hide "Spam". I don't really know exactly how they went about deciding what was and wasn't spam but it worked incredibly well.... Perhaps somebody that knows more about how WoW implemented this feature could post more about it? I know most of us aren't getting /tells from gold sellers, but with a few changes it could be made into a toggle switch for zone chat as well.

Vordar · May 2014

Daelun wrote: »

"Automatically remove all mails sent by the spammer, so people who have not yet opened them, or have been offline won't even know they received a spam mail."

And how do you propose that the server is to detect whether mail is spam or not? As someone that has been supporting real mail servers for over a decade I can tell you that there are processes like grey listing and white listing that are the most powerful tools for stopping spam and even these are not sufficient on a fully locked down POP3/SMTP server. What you are proposing is not possible without tons of legitimate emails being automatically deleted as well. Automation is not the solution here.

Well if you can flag the mail as spam and everything coming from that same account gets auto deleted for your mail that would be a start. So you only have to mark one mail as spam from the bunch of mails the same account sends to you.

SlayerTheDragon · March 2016

I have a cool idea. Kill the Templar class so that these gold farmers cannot farm delve bosses, and the problem should go away.

MishMash · March 2016

Maybe have a setting that we can only allow messages from friends and system only?

ZOS_AlanG · March 2016

Please do not necro very old threads.