After having gradually drowned in spam, I spent much of the last week configuring a new installation of SpamAssassin on my mail server, and, well, it’s awesome! My entire email experience has changed, and now I see no more than a half-dozen spam messages in a day. Last week, by comparison, I was getting upwards of 300 spam messages daily, and for the most appalling and stupid of stuff. Good Riddance!
If you have your own mail server, or even if you have access to one that someone else is running, I strongly encourage you to check out SpamAssassin and learn how to write your own local.cf file so you can have the filtering tailored to your own inflow. It’ll change your world. 🙂
Dave:
My first Internet e-mail address (bfrench@globaltc.com) was obtained in May 1994 and is still my primary address. Until I started using CloudMark about 6 months ago, I averaged 1,000 spam messages a day. Now I see about three to five.
Most people don’t have access to their mail server (and probably don’t know what it is for that matter). CloudMark is an emergent service where the 250,000 users leverage their collective effort in identifying spam. What’s nice about it is that people in earlier time zones first see new instances of creative spam techniques, and by the time I awake, my e-mail client has been ‘educated’ by the rest of the group and the message is already gone.
I’m sure there are some downsides to this approach, but so far, this has been the best solution (for me) that I’ve seen.
http://www.cloudmark.com
bf
We’re using Postini. Not perfect, but better than before. 🙂
I’m stuck with a corporate culture that mandates that I receive e-mail with a Windows e-mail client. While the ‘official’ client is (good heavens) Notes, I’ve managed to get my account configured for POP access. My Windows POP client of choice is Eudora, but my suggestion works for anyone using any POP client on Windows.
The startup Bloomba (www.bloomba.com) now offers a free download of SAProxy. This is a SpamAssassin implementation specifically for use on Windows systems. SAProxy stands between your POP server and your POP client, using the normal SpamAssassin rules to mark offending messages with a *****SPAM***** subject prefix. Messages so marked are easily filtered. The tool provides access to the SpamAssassin configuration, so you can add your own whitelist/blacklist entries, adjust the scores for each category, etc.
To setup your client, you only need to change your POP server to 127.0.0.1, and add your actual pop server hostname to the end of your POP account string. It took 30 seconds – really.
Like you, I had reached the end of my rope – I just got back from two days off and came in to find 752 messages. After SAProxy did it’s thing,
I was left with 35 actual messages, 6 spams that made it through, and the rest were happily diverted to the Eudora trash folder.
I highly recommend it.