Scram Spam
Posted at July 26, 2006 03:05 PM - Category: Compooters
I've been dealing with an increasing amount of spam getting into my inbox. I have things set up so that all my mail from the various accounts I use is forwarded over to Yahoo! for storage and webmail access. They offer an excellent web interface (the beta is the absolute shit) and good mobile access. They also had a good spam filter. They still do, but a lot more stuff is making it's way to my eyes. I get around 1500-2000 emails per day and a bit less than half of that is spam. Most of it is automated and gets filtered in my email client, and the spam gets filtered out by Yahoo.
I've done extensive spam reporting with their filter to get it to function well, but lately it seems to just not be listening. Plus, I have no feedback on how much it thinks something is spam. This leads to holes that are allowing more and more spam through. They are very good at not creating too many false positives, so I get 99.9999% of my legit email, but also about 20% of my spam is starting to get through.
I primarily use Mail.app for reading my mail and it has a built-in junk filter. However, and most curiously, that filter seems to be completely ineffective. I've actually recently reset it to ensure there wasn't some sort of corruption with it's database, but now it's not learning anything and hasn't found a single mail since I reset it. So, I was left almost defenseless until this weekend.
I'll put this simply: If you check your mail on the Mac and have a spam problem, get SpamSieve. I mean, seriously, there's no other way to put it. It's that good! I installed it this weekend as a demo and it's already gone WAY beyond anything the Mail.app junk filer has found. Plus, I have tons of feedback provided to me. Any message that SpamSieve classifies as spam is color coded to show how "spammy" it is. There are nice detailed statistics on everything, including accuracy percentages and even the individual words in the bayesian filter. I just dropped the $25 to buy it and it's been well worth it. At this point, I'm getting almost zero spam in my inbox and it's already 99.3% accurate. It's basically like DSPAM, but in client form and with better data mining tools.
In other news, I've gotta update to MoveableType 3.3. Wish me luck!
