In response to Peter’s frustration with email (again), here’s my basic spam-fighting techniques in blog form. Hope this helps.

Peter,

Just read your blog about email and saw your 100+ spam a day figure. Let me enlighten you–there are better ways to deal with that, even beyond spamassassin. I recommend Spambayes or POPfile. I’d go with Spambayes if you are just interested in spam/not spam filing. POPfile can do a bit more, for example you can have spam/friends/jabber/commercial as your “buckets”, and it will learn how to classify across these multiple destinations. If you are a software geek like me, try both.

Both of these run as proxies to POP3 or other mail fetching methods. I’m sure that if you look, you’ll find tighter-integrated OS/X stuff that uses Bayesian classification techniques. Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering internally, for example. Both Spambayes and POPfile have plugins available for my favorite mailer, Outlook.

I can’t even tell you how much spam I get a day, because almost 100% of it is caught, and the ones that aren’t caught outright are moved to my ‘junk suspects’ folder. I swear by this stuff man. (Just checked, the spam that gets by SA is only about 10 a day, much lower than it has been in the past.)

Also, if your Spamassassin isn’t at version 3.0, upgrade now. It can now id spam by the URLs the spammer wants you to go to, which is checked against a realtime blacklist. Unlike the sender blacklists, which are infamous for pissing people off who happen to share the same ISP as a spammer, this method works the other way around and is much more precise.