Normalkid:Arnold Kim

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.

I’ve always had an interest in web startups and web based businesses. There is a growing boom in internet-based companies in the past few years. The reason is clear… the cost to startup is far cheaper on the internet than it ever was. Sites are being designed for relatively minimal costs, and seem to be able to achieve overnight success. Now, of course, we only hear about the success stories (youtube, digg, myspace) rather than the countless failures or minor players in these spaces.

What’s interesting is that everyone’s measure of success is relative. I run a reasonably popular Mac-based site on the internet, but I have my sights aimed higher in the long run. A couple of notable blog entries from much larger successes underscores that for entrepreneurs what you have is never enough.

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