I think my first try at an anti-spam solution for work is going to be the free product at GFI: MailEssentials
I’ll probably try installing it this week. There’s a 60 day trial that becomes a free version that just the blacklist/whitelist features. I’ll probably just start by creating Spam folders for everyone and filtering the DNSBL items into there. We’ll see how well that does on false-positives and go from there.
Man, I continually learn more and more about the Google Toolbar. I’ve been using it since they put it out, and I believe I shed a tear of joy when they updated it with the pop-up blocker. Today I learned that the shortcut Alt-G takes you to the search window. Very cool to know.
Recently, I’ve been investigating spam filters.
I did use Cloudmark’s product SpamNet, which used a community to filter spam. The idea is that if enough people block a message, then everyone else that gets the same message also has it block.
Good idea, but spam has moved past that.
Next I read about SpamAssassin, thinking it might be useful to install at work. We get a lot o’ spam. In reading about SA’s Bayesian filter, I stumbled across the K9 POP3 spam filter. It stands in between your POP3 client (I use Outlook). You point your client at K9, request mail, it takes the request, contacts your server, downloads the mail, then processes it.
It parses all the tokens and adds them to a database based on whether or not the email is spam or not. So, you have to hand sort a number of meesages to build your database of spam tokens. I’m still in my first week of using it, but it’s doing a great job so far. I’m still getting a couple spams a day through the filter, but it’s almost eliminated the mail from the -owners list.
I’ve noticed that the messages that DO get through are putting random words at the bottom of the message. Supposedly, these words are typically found in a non-spam database and would lower the probability that a message is spam.
Enough on spam for now.
I like to learn. I tend to get a lot of random things that I want to learn about. So, I finally made a place to collect all the cool things that I’ve been learning about, with links to what they’re all about.
This is more for me than for anyone else, but you’re welcome to read and comment.
