SPAM

It fills my inbox so much that, at times, it seems to be the only form of communication I get. Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed by it, that I start ignoring my e-mail. It is a form of advertisement that doesn't work on me (in fact, very few forms of advertisement work on me). All that spam does is make me angry and never want to support the jackasses sending me spam.

I do many things to combat it, each with various degrees of success:

• I try and obfuscate my e-mail on web-pages. Most spammed addresses are gathered by programs called "spam-bots" that spider their way through the web looking for e-mail addresses. These programs harvest e-mail addresses from web-pages, html, newsgroups and mailing lists. By altering my address I can make it very hard for a non-sentient entity to figure out what it is.
  • Why this doesn't work: This works to a degree... Unfortunately, there's only so far you can go with this before it becomes unreadable to humans as well. You can spell the address out (sam at foo dot com), but there will always be some idiot out there who wont be able to figure out what that means, or some spam-bot that can. You can replace your address with an image, but then the blind cannot contact you based upon your web-page unless you also include the address as plain-text in the image's alt tag (and spam-bots can just read it there). Plus, you don't have control of your e-mail address on pages you don't personally maintain. (Just take a look at all the places my personal e-mail address is listed according to Google: http://www.google.com/search?&q=+%22criswell%40geekcomix.com%22+-site%3Ageekcomix.com)
• I filter my e-mail with VipulsRazor. VipulsRazor is one of MyFavoriteApps. It's this great little distributed P2P spam-filter. It works sometimes, but ultimately relies upon the honor system. I even have a spam-trap you can find here: http://tux4kids.carrolltoncityschools.net/uce/troll.html
  • Why this doesn't work: Well, it relies on the honor system, and can be abused by spammers sending legitimate e-mail into it and screwing up its works (by making it have more false positives than not).
• I filter my e-mail with SpamAssassin. Another one of MyFavoriteApps. When used with VipulsRazor, SpamAssassin filters mail very well indeed. I would estimate it filters 80-90% of all spam I get.
  • Why this doesn't work: You can tweak SpamAssassin so that it is more or less sensitive. If you make it too sensitive, then you get a lot of non-spam filtered as spam. If you set it not sensitive enough, then spam gets through. Plus, on its own (without VipulsRazor along side it) it does a pretty poor job.
• I filter my e-mail with complex procmail scripts. The last thing I do (after everything is said and done) is perform even more filtering to catch any blatant stragglers that I know get through. You can see a copy of the .procmailrc file I use here: http://tux4kids.carrolltoncityschools.net/~criswell/procmailrc
  • Why this doesn't work: Well, you get a lot of false-positives if you're not too careful. For example, cox.net is notorious for being lax on spammers. But if I block all of cox.net, then I block a large segment of the legitimate e-mailing community.

By combining all of these techniques, I manage to filter quite a bit of spam. Quite a bit still gets through, but it is considerably less than it otherwise would.

On average, I get between 100 and 300 new messages a day. Of those, roughly 50-70% is spam.

(See also EmailPolicy, and [my spam counter])