How I reduced spam at home - Part 1

I have had an e-mail address since 1995. Over the following years I have added to my list of e-mails. The old ones forward on to a catchall account. I have multiple domain names registered in my name and e-mails associated with that. I have purchased thousands of dollars worth of items on the net over the years. I have signed-up for mailing lists, some I have stayed on, others I have unsubscribed from. There are many "free" programs and web pages that I have signed up for access. Over the years since 1995, I have posted many times on discussion boards and newsgroups. All of those combined with e-mails listed on various versions of my webpages and blogs all mean that I have a lot of e-mail exposure on the net.

Because of all of that, I have seen my share of spam. A few years ago I was getting 500 spam e-mail messages a day. Most of that could be attributed to my domains that I have registered. The way the mail was configured for them, any mail that was sent to a nonexistent account at that domain would get forwarded to one of my accounts. Therefore generator bots were really hitting me hard on those domains.
I went into the mail configuration settings and changed it so that it would ignore any messages coming in to nonexistent accounts on the domains.
That reduced my e-mail to about 100 spam e-mails a day.

While that sounds good at first glance, having to sort through 120 messages a day in order to get the 20 real e-mail messages and throw out the 100 spam messages is still painful.

That left me a few options to get rid of that spam. I could keep doing what I was doing - it worked well enough. But the issue was the amount of time that it took. I could use the built-in software on my e-mail client (I have used a variety of different clients over the years on a variety of platforms - elm, pine, Eudora, Outlook/Outlook Express, Netscape/Mozilla, webmail, and now Mail.app), but those all vary in their quality and success.

I have also had a variety of different network connection types and speeds. I currently live in Bermuda and for a variety of reasons the network connections that we have here are slower and more expensive than what people in the U.S. are able to enjoy.
As a result, depending on my connection speed, I would make different choices as to what options to use.

That describes my own general issues that I had. I will go into further detail on those, and more importantly I will continue on my own solution that now allows me to catch nearly all of my spam these days. (Out of 120 messages or so that I get everyday, at most of them are "real" and the rest are spam. My server will catch about 100 of them. On any given day, anywhere from 0-10 spam messages will get through that system and show up in those totals.)

Look for the ensuing parts of this discussion for more.

Posted by Eric at March 6, 2004 11:23 PM | TrackBack