Spam Filtering

My personal spam filtering efforts have jumped up a notch since the first time I wrote about the topic of spam filtering, back in April. The latest change came about just this week, when my trusty (yet spam filter free) version of Eudora croaked. I'm not exactly sure what stuck the fork in my copy of Eudora, all I know is that I was unable to open any of my mail folders. Of course, this made my day quite difficult. Rather than panic (okay, so maybe I did panic a bit), I set off to find a program to take the reigns--at least for a while. I had been using the free ad-supported version of Eudora for quite some time. But I was a bit bummed to learn that I needed to upgrade to a paid version of Eudora to take advantage of its spam filtering capabilities.

Like a zombie that returns to the shopping mall, I gravitated back to the Mozilla mothership. It had been a while since I last visited (to pick up a copy of the most excellent Firefox browser). I thought that perhaps I would load the latest copy of Mozilla to take advantage of its email client. But what I found was even better ... an email client that I'd never seen before: Mozilla Thunderbird. To my great pleasure, I discovered that Thunderbird comes with a spam filter built into the program ...

Previously, I filtered my spam load by half. I did this with three key moves:

I began by abandoning an old legacy email address that I had been carrying around for years and years. With this simple move, I eliminated a huge amount of unsolicited commercial luncheon meat.

Then, I made a simple change to my email server, dumping all email that was not specifically addressed to a real live email address. Poof! Another large chunk of the spamload was filtered directly into the void.

And finally, I started using Mailwasher to delete unwanted email from my mailserver, without ever having to download it to an email client. Deleting the email without downloading saves time and avoids sending any mail opening pings back to the spammer.

After downloading and installing Mozilla Thunderbird, I began training its spam filters. Thunderbird uses adaptive filters to analyze each and every email to determine which pieces have the most likelihood of being spam. You can choose to have the suspected spam deleted or moved to a special folder. All-in-all it's been fairly easy to use. The more mail I mark as spam, the more pieces it catches. I'm planning to pause using Mailwasher, in order to give Thunderbird plenty of spam to train its filters.

Some folks get their kicks by training their dogs. Well, woof. I like training my spam filter!

BTW, Thunderbird includes a spell checker as well ... alas, it didn't recognize words like spam and Thunderbird ...