If you think that you’re getting a lot more spam these days, you’re not alone. Analyst have been forecasting a steady raise in spam volume for many years. Apparently, last July, spam levels crept up again. Since 1997, I’ve owned the same email address on the auberger.com domain. Needless to say that it’s been pilfered many times over by unscrupulous bots and I’ve been the unwilling recipient of all sort of scams, shady offers and other nuisances. I’ve witnessed first hand the steady increase in volume of undesired emails. I had been relatively satisfied with the filtering that Spam assasin and the built-in junk filter in OS X Mail offered. However, I recently found myself having to lower the trigger point for spam, increasing false positive. Also the fact that the server based Spam Assassin does not catch everything lead to getting a lot of spam on my cell phone when I connect on the go, which is very infuriating since the data traffic is metered and bandwidth limited. I decided it was time to put the kibosh on this spam thing. I signed up for a white-listed e-mail filtering tool called Spam Arrest. It was easy to upload my contacts and pre-set a list of authorized senders. Anyone sending me an email who’s not on the list will be presented with a challenge email and after they complete a simple validation step will get authorized. Not a huge burden for legitimate senders but will stop spammer dead in their track.
Three days into it and I’m very satisfied with the results. Shockingly, over 90% of the mail received is spam. In other word, for every legitimate e-mail I receive, there are 9 pieces of garbage attempting to sneak into my inbox. It’s safe to say that the US government’s attempt to curb the problem with its CAN-SPAM act has been an utter failure.
If you’re trying to send me an email and are not white-listed yet, I appreciate you taking the extra step to be authorized. My inbox and I will be forever grateful.
Incidentally, the New Yorked just posted an article about Damn Spam, The losing war on junk e-mail.
One Comment
So what happens if my spam filter thinks the email from Spam Arrest is spam?
I finally gave up and let Google handle my mail. Their spam filtering is pretty good. I have so few false positives that I don’t check anymore. I get one or two false negatives a day but they don’t bug me too much. I get way more random crap that I signed up for but immediately delete.
I did notice the other day that I get about as many feed items (LiveJournal friends posts and RSS items through Google Reader) as spam messages. So I come out about even.