I’ve been working towards today for weeks and weeks. First I installed SpamAssassin and spent weeks fine-tuning my rulesets (I have over 1000 custom rules now). Then I installed procmail, which was a lot more difficult than it needed to be because of my having a Verio VPS account (for now). Finally got that working this morning, after having an email black hole for about an hour last night (it’s weird to see messages arrive in the log file but not have them written to a file on the server).

And the final step: I am splitting off all my spam messages (typically over 250/day) to a new mailbox, and have created a new POP user account that’s just the spam mail I receive. This means that it’s not in my regular mailbox and I can finally receive my email without having 90% of it be junk offers. Hurray!

The very last step I took was to create a custom login page on the wonderful Mail2Web service, a free web-based POP mail system. So now whenever I have a few minutes to spare, I can log in there, scan through for any false hits (e.g., mail that was categorized as spam but isn’t) and then pull the old ‘e-flush lever’ on the rest.

I’m a happy guy today!