Re: [NTLK] Spam?

At 11:30 AM -0700 7/16/09, Bob Carls Dudney wrote:
>Why I have my server set to deliver all spam with [SPAM] in header so
>Eudora filter pops 'em into my spam mailbox. Well worth the few
>seconds it takes to scan and delete manually. When I get to more than
>few dozen a day I change email addresses.

Yeah, email that comes to my own SMTP server (the beanblossom.in.us addresses) is subjected to only a very small amount of filtering that bounces. There is some, because I've determined over the years that I can exclude a surprising amount of spam with some simple filters that never generate false positives, by weeding out any filter that ever generated a false positive. And even that spam is bounced, so if a false positive ever were to occur, the sender would know it had happened.

However, I use a couple of pobox.com addresses, a mac.com/me.com address, and a gmail.com address, where the spam filtering can be a bit more Draconian, and reviewing the filtered messages, where possible, is so time consuming and tedious that I no longer do it. I've been able to tune the pobox.com filtering to a reasonable extent, but have still seen it generate false positives. If these kinds of services provided tiered spam mailboxes, so patently obvious spam went into one folder, and stuff that was on the bubble went into a different folder, so there were not so many hundreds or thousands of messages to review, I might actually go look at them. But as it is, A) I don't have time, and B) my own brain can miss good messages, because I get burned out looking at message after message of junk. And you can't always tell from just the subject line and sender whether it's junk or not, and going to the whole message and then back to the list of messages is even more time-consuming and tedious. What a terribl
e waste of time.

Right now, things seem to be working relatively well, with little spam getting through and with few if any false positives (to my knowledge :} ). But it wasn't easy getting things to this point, and the spammers have sure made email a lot more difficult and less reliable than it should, and used to be.

- larryy

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Received on Thu Jul 16 16:27:08 2009