Devil Works

I’ve had websites online since somewhere around 1999. In the good old days people didn’t think twice about putting their email address on there site and mine was online for quite a while.

The unfortunate thing about this is that spammers use a spider to travel the web and pick up email addresses. One of my accounts averages about 250 emails a day, and about 245 of those are spam.

I’ve tried a couple of different spam filters with varying levels of success. Mailwasher Pro was okay for a while. I liked the fact that I could check the sender and header before deleting the emails off the server. But after a while it lost it’s effectiveness to the point where it was only catching around 20% of the spam I was receiving.

I also tried SpamAssasin, this was much more effective. I’d say it was catching 99% of the spam I was getting. Unfortunately it was marking as spam quite a few emails that were actually important. ie email from my webhosting provider, paypal and the worst of all the registries where I buy my domains. This created a minor disaster when I lost a couple of domains because I never recieved the expiry notice. Though I should say that if I was a slight bit organised then I wouldnt have needed to get the expiry reminder. I tried adding certain domains to the whitelist but I’m not a mind reader and couldn’t be certain where these emails were coming from.

For a while now I’ve been using a gmail account and slowly updating my email addresses at various places to us that account. The spam filter at gmail is spectacularly good and I’m loving it, however there are some services I use that will not accept registration from free email account providers.

So I’ve just started my fourth effort at filtering spam. What I’m now doing is forwarding one of my main email accounts through to my gmail account. This was pretty easy to do through the Cpanel interface that my web host provides.

After about 18 hours Gmail has been accurate in detecting spam in about 98% of cases. I’ve had one email falsely identified as spam, but that was from a spammy sounding mailing list that I signed up to years ago that occassionally has interesting info.

So far I’ve very happy with the results, I think that I’ll keep checking the spam folder once a week for false positives for a little while but then I should be okay.