I’m forever battling spam, as I don’t make much of an effort to mask my e-mail address on online forums in particularly difficult ways (See my contact page for an example). Historically too, my posts to Usenet and mailing lists are only slightly masqueraded with “at” instead of “@”, so e-mail harvesters don’t have too much difficulty transposing my addresses. This was a decision I took ages ago, but am now slightly regretting, but I figured spam to be a battle you could never win if you have an internet presence like I do. I do change the prefix of my address depending on who I’m e-mail (If buying from acme industries ltd, I’ll use that instead of richard in the first part of my e-mail address), so I can find out how my address is being (ab)used by companies and duly give them grief if they start spamming. A useful trick to use if you own your own domain.
As I’ve also recently leased my own server, and now run MailScanner to catch obvious spam at the mail infrastructure level, things have calmed down somewhat. But they’re only as good for so much, as it’s a never ending chase the spamming software, and spam-filter writers, try to outwit one another. Generally, I fear that the spammers are winning, as they find new innovative ways of mis-spelling words, using images, and abusing open mail relays.
Perhaps the most annoying technique of all is the abuse of real mail addresses. You spot this when you get a ‘bounce’ message for something you know you didn’t send. It just feels like somebody is abusing your name in some seedy way.
So whilst I do have quite aggressive mail filtering coming through, I found that I was still wasting a lot of time marking mail as spam for the increasingly haphazard apple Mail client “junk filter” to “learn”. On the whole it does a reasonable job, but not good enough by a long way. I was simply wasting too much time helping it do it’s job. It sort of felt like the junk filter as one of those brave, but surely foolish, amateur cooks in Gordon Ramsey’s F-Word kitchen - not keeping up with things, and getting shouted a lot out of frustration. I shout a lot at my computer, up here in the loft.
So I’m currently running SpamSieve, which has so far done a remarkable job at keeping up with the spammers. Sure a few things creep through, but it’s getting distinctly better, and freeing me up to surf^h^h^h^hget on with work in just the way I wanted to.
The statistics are interesting. Since July 1st, I’ve had 2813 Good Messages, 612 of which (18%) have been spam. That’s 110 Spam messages per day. It’s missed 21, making it 99.4% correct. My guesstimate would say that’s a couple of percentage points better than Mail.app, and amounts to a huge difference when e-mail is such an important communication channel in your daily work. It’s also rather scary to think how much sheer rubbish is getting through my layers of defence, I do feel kinda sorry for new comers to the interweb who see the signal/noise ratio appear so awful.
So, any Apple users out there are well advised to check out SpamSieve. Sure, it’s a tiny bit convoluted to set up, but weigh up the convolution against the time wasted marking messages as spam every now and then, and I think you’ll find yourself agreeing with me that this is a great little product, that helps substantially in the battle against spam.
Entries (RSS)