How I reduced spam at home - Part 2

There wasn't a single way that I reduced all of the spam. I should also note that the various ways that I reduced it were non-trivial for the average user that doesn't necessarily know much about computers, but just wants to drastically reduce spam in their inbox.

In review, I had widely distributed multiple e-mail addresses on the net in multiple places and protocols on the net. There is no way to pull them back (for instance, any/all of my posts to newsgroups are now searchable via Google, and until the addresses are obfuscated by Google, they remain open to scans by bots).
I have multiple domain names and with that registered addresses that go with that (I won't go into the physical junk mail that will garner someone with).
And the other various issues I mentioned in the previous post in this series.

Over time, the various ways I reduced the spam in my inbox were:
1) limit the forwarding of nonexistent addresses at my various domain names (it was previously set so that if jay@domainname.com wasn't registered by bob@domainname.com was (and was designated as the "main" account), then any mail sent to jay@domain... would be delivered to bob@domain...
This became an issue as some of my domain names were names that people were using to sign up for things that didn't require a response from.

2) I installed SpamAssassin on my Pair.com server. (they have since installed it themselves on servers, but since I already had my own install, I haven't bothered too much with their built in system)
When I first installed this, most of my e-mail checking was done via SSH into my account and then using Pine. From there I setup some scripts that allowed me to keep a spam folder on which I could train the system, as well as my inbox and other folders.

3) The client side spam-check. Like I said, at first I was just using Pine when I had installed Spamassassin. Then I moved to Outlook (Outlook Express nice and lightweight, but along with that it is weak on many counts and apparently hard/impossible to write plug-ins for since nobody does it right now). With Outlook I tried the built-in junk mail filter on the bits of spam that were still making it through the block on the server. The fact of the matter is that it is totally useless. I have heard that the new Outlook 2003 is much better, but I haven't used it at all. I then installed SpamBayes and that made a large difference. After about 1-3 weeks of training (would have been faster if I had a larger volume of spam coming in - I only had at most 10 a day and more like 1 to 5), it was pretty much good to go.
I then switched OSes to Mac OS X and I use Mail.app on that system. The built in junk mail feature in this one is fantastic.

So that pretty much sums it up, but I will go into more detail of each step after this.

So changes in net behavior, changes in server software, change in client side software.

Like I mentioned, these aren't necessarily the best options for the average computer user that just wants to reduce the spam - in a later part of this series I will discuss easy solutions for the average user.

Posted by Eric at March 8, 2004 04:16 PM | TrackBack