LuxFX / They Think They’re Newsworthy

I’m sick and tired of spam. I have yet to run any of the really hard-core filters because I’m worried about false positives — good emails that get mistakenly marked as bad. It’s not that big a deal for a lot of people because they can just go through their spam folder that they’ve filtered the marked email to every few days and make sure nothing good wound up there. But my spam folder grows by a couple of thousand emails a day. I can’t go through that! So even though my spam grows more and more, the only filters I use are hand-coded, hard-coded filters that target my specific mail history. But the problem with that is that it takes forever to create these filters, and I’ve already got about 2,000 of them, which is slowing down my email. And I’ve watched my filter effectiveness drop from 80%-85% effective, down to about 50% effective.

Which, combined with my general increase in spam, means that I’m having to hand sort more and more email every day. It’s gotten to the point where I realize that I’m throwing out several false positives myself every now and then, just because I don’t have the time or concentration to really fully analyze all of my email. I’m afraid I’m at the point where I’ve become a “select all”-”delete” first, ask questions later kind of guy.

So it’s finally time for the big guns. I’m using SpamAssassin now, which is already helping out. I figure as many false positives as SpamAssassin might bring — I’m past that number myself. So it’s really a lesser-of-two-evils route. Not the best solution. But anything to cut down on my spam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.