My Spam Solution
I got a lot of spam.
I know some of you are saying “sure, we all get a lot of spam”. But for me, a combination of running various websites over the years, and not wanting to throw away my email addresses has resulted in me being a particularly high spam recipient. So much so, that it had become a full time job just trying to clear out my spam folder.
I’ve tried Apple’s Mail, Gmail and a couple of other 3rd party applications to help filter my spam. The problem with all of these solutions has been that of False Positives. False Positives being legitimate emails that get tagged as spam and buried in my Spam folder. Running various websites, I might frequently get sales/advertising inquiries which could easily trigger normal Spam filters.
So based on a recommendation I read in another blog, I signed up for SpamStopsHere.com. (No referral link, this is not an ad. I’m simply a happy customer.) Note, it’s only available to users who host their own domain and costs $10-$19/mo to start for basic service.
Again, my priority was to avoid false positives, so their filtering system appealed to me. They filter based on known urls, phone numbers and phrases, allowing you to simply reject those emails with a pretty high confidence that you are not bouncing any legitimate emails. They have additional filters of varying criteria which you can tweak to your satisfaction.
Here’s my stats from this month to date. Note, a high number of legitimate emails are automated notifications, so the real number of actual emails I have to read is much smaller:
That’s over 6500 spam emails a day that get rejected automatically and I’m confident those rejects are really spam.
I still get some spam as well, but a far more manageable amount that I just delete as I go through my email. I’m also pretty confident that legitimate emails are not getting blocked. I don’t use spam filters anymore on my home computer.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:34 am
We’re using a Barracuda Spam Firewall at work and it seems to work in a similar manner. So far - no false positives.
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/
September 6th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Viagra, viagra, viagra.
Just kidding.
This sounds like a good idea. I’ve been using Thunderbird’s inbuilt spam filtering, which has a learning algorithm. But the problem is that on the few occasions where I’m travelling and forced to use webmail, I’m buried in 300 spam per day.
Seems like it’s even more important to get spam sorted out if you’re using an iPhone, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to bulk delete messages.