Technical Ramblings

Ever since I had some problems with my server and Crucial Paradigm, I’ve been having too much spam in my inbox. I thought I had the exact same spamassasin config, but either I missed something, or the settings have just gotten less effective.

This morning, when I woke up to check the mail on expired domains from www.spamzilla.io, I finally got fed up and decided it was time to do something about the fact that my inbox was about 90% junk mail which was hiding the essential mails.

I’ve had a Gmail account since around August 2004, but I never use it. However, I do know that Google has better spam prevention than I do: something about having hundreds or thousands of humans acting as bayesian filters helps them. (Mm, scale.) After having recently implement Akismet for spam checking on the MetaCarta Labs weblog — with the result being that about 98% of the 3000 spams it gets every week are now gettin caught — I decided it was time to do something about my inbox spam.

So, I set up crschmidt@crschmidt.net to act as a forward to Gmail, and then set up my fetchmail to fetch from Gmail instead of from localhost.

Results so far are extremely positive:  Of the 85 emails that made it past my local spamassasin filter and into Gmail, 75 of them were spam. Gmail caught all but two. So, instead of 85 messages in my inbox, 10 real, I ended up with 12, and 10 of them were real.

If this stays true, my personal email address may actually become a reasonable way to contact me again. Sorting through the 200 spam I get every day and finding the wheat was becoming an almost impossible task, and this may have at least given me a leg up temporarily.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 7:33 pm and is filed under default, meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.