Junk Mail
November 02, 2003 | 
13 Comments
This week I installed Panther and it’s great. I’ve had a few minor issues. For example the fonts occasionally go blurry, they look really bad in Safari, and my help browser is all broken.
These issues aren’t a big deal, what is a big deal is my junk mail filter in Mail got reset or is somehow not working now. I’ve tried to fix it but it seems I just need to retrain it. It had been going strong for months, moving all kinds of crap out of my inbox. Now I’m reminded at how bad it really is.
90% of my incoming mail is spam, and since I get quite a few messages a day, you can imagine that the volume is pretty ridiculous.
The thing is, as much as it pisses me off, I feel that aside from grudgingly dealing with it until I can get the filter to the point where it weeds most of it out there isn’t much I can do about it.
I do know there are options but frankly I spend enough time as it is trying to deal with this kind of crap. I want something easy. I want spam to stop but I’ve come to realize that spam is just a fact of life that I have to deal with.
Having said that, I’d be interested to hear how others deal with spam. Any easy to implement ideas would be welcome.
Filed under: Macs and OSX
Comments
1. Dave S. said:
I’ve been using Thunderbird on Jaguar exclusively for about two or three weeks. The Bayesian filtering is really great - there were some false positives as I was training it, but not a one since. It hasn’t blocked everything, but it really is doing rather well.
That being said, Thunderbird 0.2 is still quirky (although it’s hard to call it beta), and I’m scared of bumping up to 0.3 because I don’t want to lose my filters… but I’ll inevitably have to do it sooner or later.
Posted on November 2, 2003 11:57 AM | #
2. Simon Fodden said:
I finally went over to a white list, which works pretty well in OS X. Nothing gets to the inbox unless it’s from someone in my address book or someone to whom I’ve sent email. I do have to check my Junk folder for the diamond in the rough, but that’s a lot easier than flinging out the dozen or so spams that got through my earlier (well-trained) filters.
Posted on November 2, 2003 12:54 PM | #
3. Roger Johansson said:
I’d just stick with Apple Mail and wait for it to re-learn everything. Before Apple Mail had a junk mail filter I tried a couple of spam killers, but now I just let Mail handle it.
Btw something sure seems to have gone wrong with your Panther install. After running it for just over a week, I haven’t seen any of the problems you mention.
Posted on November 2, 2003 01:14 PM | #
4. Christian said:
As a (lone) Windows user, I recently installed SpamBayes for Outlook, which seems to work very well. It uses Baynesian logic to learn which emails to block, so presumably, the more spam you get, the better it works.
Not much use for you though Keith–sorry ‘bout that.
Posted on November 2, 2003 01:16 PM | #
5. Walker said:
For awhile, I didn’t get any junkmail. I never posted my e-mail address anywhere on any of my web sites. I only corresponded with people I knew wouldn’t add me to some forward list, and things were great. But somewhere along the line, someone slipped up. To be fair, it was probably me. But to this day, I still don’t post my e-mail address anywhere online. Until I graduate in May, I’ll use my school e-mail address for that kind of thing.
Anyway, if I were you (and I’m about to have to do this myself), I would just create a new e-mail account under your domain and slowly phase the old one out. Of course, that means not only updating your old e-mail address all over your site(s), but also removing all the old links to it. Then just guard the new one with your life.
Come to think of it, this probably isn’t practical for you, but I know I’ll do it.
Posted on November 2, 2003 03:09 PM | #
6. Charles Stuart said:
I hope you know about this:
http://hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php
As well I make a lot of aliases, 1@enure.net, 2@enure.net, … and use those when I publish my email address. That way I can just delete the aliases when they become a problem.
Posted on November 2, 2003 10:47 PM | #
7. Scott said:
Charles is spot on, stopping spam starts with your code. I noticed (hope you dont mind) in your source your email address is naked for all the spam bots in the world to grab.
I was suffering with around 50 spams a day however I bit the bullet and deleted my old email address from my server and created a new one. I then used hivewares (hiveware.com) enkoder to protect my new email address.
This was six months ago and since then not one spam, at all. And the emails to my old address I assume are bounced straight back to the spammer (I hope).
Hope this helps.
Posted on November 3, 2003 12:57 AM | #
8. Keith said:
Thanks for all the advice and feedback. I’m still not sure what I plan on doing. I do know about the enkoder and think it’s a great tool and solution.
I also think it may be too late. My email address is out there all over the place. I’ve had the same address for 7 years or so, and I don’t want to change it.
But it’s something to think about.
I just wish the people who make these spam bots and send out spam would wake up and realize they are wasting not only my time, but theirs as well. All that hard work, just getting placed in the trash.
Stupid gits.
Posted on November 3, 2003 10:25 AM | #
9. Ken Edwards said:
I used to use my PC for my email, for about 8 months. I used POPFile, which is an open source bayesian filter. I just installed POPFile on Panther, which is not an easy thing to do. You need the Developer Tools to do so. If you want to check out how, check out my blog. I am posting a follow up here soon on it, spacificly telling how to configure everything.
I turned off the Mail Junk mail filter, and just use POPFile now. It does better then my well trained Mail junk mail filter ever did.
I know this is not an easy fix for OS X, but it is, IMO the best. its the cheapest way to get rock solid Bayesian filtering done right (POPFile is free).
Posted on November 3, 2003 10:52 PM | #
10. Dave said:
I’m with Ken, POPFile I found really good, I now rarely get any junk. However last time I checked it had problems with attachments; you have to disable it and download mail, then enable it again (not fun if you’ve downloaded 200 messages and it errors!!!)
However it might have been fixed in the later version..
Posted on November 4, 2003 02:29 AM | #
11. taivn02 said:
i have problem to install my antiSpam soft
Posted on November 5, 2003 06:16 PM | #
12. Jan said:
I don’t hate SPAM… it actually fills my inbox a little bit so I’m not lonely :)
Posted on November 21, 2003 04:39 AM | #
13. Blah da Silva said:
spam me
blah@lanrjlab.no-ip.com
blah@lanrjlab.no-ip.com
blah@lanrjlab.no-ip.com
Posted on December 17, 2003 09:16 AM | #
Comments are now closed