i've decided to give in on fighting spam with bayesian filters and move to a challenge/response system, namely, mailblocks.com. it's dirt cheap at $25 per YEAR, and if it works as advertised it seems to be the right solutions for my mobile lifestyle. that, and the continuing suckiness of my DSL provider, Speakeasy, makes me think that hosting mail somewhere else might not be such a bad idea.
i receive most of my email on the go, and although have an unlimited data plan, the alerts received from spam have gotten too annoying. plus, i can pull in the already filtered email i receive on hotmail and yahoo and consoldiate it into one account that i can pull down to my mobile devices.
on my desktop, i use apple mail, which used to catch 100% of the spam, and now catches about 25% as spammers have gotten the best of bayesian filtering. same with procmail solutions. there's probably better things i could and am able to install, but it's just not worth it as hosted email is getting so dirt cheap.
so on to the next battle, until spammers figure out C&R. is this the right solution to spam? probably not. personally, if sending spam was punishable by their choice of death or roo-roo, they might think twice about sending it.
I'm not a big fan on challenge/response systems. Check out spamassassin, I'm getting great results after turning on bayesian and the online checks.
Posted by: Anders at April 25, 2004 05:09 AM
You'll love Mailblocks. I've been using Mailblocks for a while now and haven't gotten a single spam message. I know people don't like Challenge/Response, but I was able to import my address book and mark everyone as legit senders and so people that I knew didn't get CR.
Mailblocks also puts all messages that haven't passed the CR in the pending folder and I peek in there periodically to look for legit emails and so I haven't really had any problems with the whole challenge/response system.
Posted by: Vinny Carpenter at April 26, 2004 11:21 AM
well, i have privacy manager on my phone at home too, so i'm fine with c/r.
mailblocks seems to be working great!
a few minor things... such as no way to import an Apple address book ( it exports vCards only) and a few wierd problems downloading attachments from the webapp (like .jpg files download with a .jp extension) but otherwise, good reliable service.
Posted by: steve at April 26, 2004 11:45 AM