Eww gross, spam
For the past year-ish, I’ve been using knowspam.net to keep out all of the truckloads of spam that get sent to my primary address.
It was pretty cool at first. Whitelist spam solutions have their downsides, but spam never got through to the inbox on my computer, and that makes a happy Katie.
Except that the developer hasn’t, uh, developed it at all in over a year. He never announced to his users that the project was going to sit around gathering dust, he just moved on. That, to me, is a bit of a jerky move. I mean, we’re paying $20 a year for this service and even the most basic of bugs aren’t being fixed — bugs that have been around for a couple of years now.
So now I’m relying on Mail.app’s built-in spam filter, which I estimate to be somewhere around 95% accurate. 95% is good, except when you get two or three hundred spams a day. Maybe it’ll get better with more training (it already has), but I’m interested to hear how other people are filtering out spam on POP3 accounts.
I mean, there’s gotta be something new and awesome out there, right?
(Non-answers like “use Gmail” and “get a new address” need not apply.)
I’m really liking mozilla thunderbird, now i dont’ get nearly as mcuh spam as you do, but i gave up mail.app in favor of thunderbird, and haven’t delt with a single spam/false positive.
Comment by Sean — 3/24/2005 @ 8:24 pm
Katie…
I’ve been using spamsieve (do a google search. first result.) for awhile and it works brilliantly. I would highly recommend it. It takes a little bit of time to train, but once you do, it’s great. It’s an applescript, so it works excellently with mail.app.
My web host also has spam assassin and I just recently enabled that as well. Between the combination, it is very very rare that a spam message gets into my inbox.
I probably don’t get two to three hundred per day directed my way (hey! that rhymes), but I do get at least a hundred to two hundred.
Comment by Paul — 3/24/2005 @ 8:44 pm
Sean > I’ve used Thunderbird before on Windows, and when I switched to Mac, I was unable to get it to read my old profile (even with the help of all the MozillaZine forum members), so I ended up switching to Mail.app. I remember that around one of the milestones (.7?), Thunderbird’s spam filter quit working nearly as good as it used to (many other users reported the same thing), which is what drove me to knowspam in the first place. Did you find Tbird’s spam filter to be noticeably better than Mail.app’s, or was it other factors that led you to switch?
Paul > spamsieve sounds interesting. I’ll have to give it a look.
Comment by Katie — 3/24/2005 @ 11:28 pm
MailBlocks.com ! They are the best thing out there IMHO. They use those captcha human tests to test messages from new addresses. http://captcha.net/
They’ll check your mail or you forward it to them. They will create multiple addresses that can be disposed of later, sent automatically to a special mailbox, or to just pass through. When you send mail to someone it automatically whilelists them. Otherwise they are greylisted (they must take the test). They’ve also got a great web client and it works great with Mail.app. Plus you can forward multiple addresses to the filtered account!
See the help for features http://support.mailblocks.com/tabhowto/main/topicmain.aspx
Comment by Gary LaPointe — 3/25/2005 @ 9:15 pm
PART 2: I knew MailBlocks had been purchased by AOL, but I just realized they weren’t taking new customers (sorry). We were just talking about MB at a network administrators’ meeting this week and none of the supporters they seemed to be aware of the new customer issue.
http://spamarrest.com/ is a competitor and I’m sure there are more. I looked at the web site and it sure looked pretty similar. It’s got a 30 day trial so you might want to try them…
Comment by Gary LaPointe — 3/25/2005 @ 9:44 pm
i’m not using my ISP pop3 account anymore, because the amount of spam is overwhelming. and they boast that their spam filter is so good!
i use my university address, where i get about 5 spam emails a day? my badpoetry address forwards to my university one i think, so i get around 5 a day from the two combined.
sorry i can’t recommend anything katie! hope you get it sorted!
Comment by mae — 3/27/2005 @ 1:14 pm
oh, by the way, after being able to access your website again the other day i read through all the entries i had missed and commented upon all of them. in the end your spam filter thought i was a spam robot and didn’t show them anymore! so you have some mae comments in your comment moderation inbox or whatever it should be called, in case you might actually want to read them. ;p
never had that happening to me before! ;p
Comment by mae — 3/27/2005 @ 1:20 pm
So what did you ever do as a solution?!?
Comment by Gary LaPointe — 4/20/2005 @ 9:29 pm
I decided that I’m poor and don’t care enough to pay money to have my spam filtered. I’m using Mail.app’s filter, which is improving considerably with training. I never really liked having to filter everything through a second server — when I was away from my own computer, it made webmail less straight-forward and I hate webmail to start with.
Comment by Katie — 4/20/2005 @ 10:11 pm