steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

    I used to love getting a lot of email. It made me feel important. It made me feel wanted. These days, however, 99% of the email (in terms of volume) is junk, spam, crapola - call it what you want. It is is simply unwanted - and it has started to make me loath even looking at my inbox. When I moved my hosting operations from my own house to pair.com, I was finally able to take advantage of a wonderful little spam tool called SpamAssassin. There are many tools to get rid of or block spam, but this is by far the best I have found. SpamAssassin (also known as SA) filtering is built into Pair's email servers. (I had wanted to build this functionality into my own qmail servers, but I lacked the motivation and time to do so.) The way you activate it is by simply marked a checkbox in your email account properties and whamo... most of the junk email you receive will be premarked with a **JUNK** prefix in the subject line. So, all I had to do after activating spam filtering via SA was set up a rule in my email client to move all email marked with **JUNK** to the trash bin. The amount of false positives (i.e. the number of emails marked as **JUNK** that are legitimate) is about 1 in 1,500 emails (for me). The number of false negatives is about 2 in 100 emails. Those are pretty damn good odds, if you ask me. Pair has an added goodie that will move all your junk mail [automatically] to a text file in your home directory root (on your webserver) - which eliminates the need for the rule that moves said emails to the trash bin. Because of the low number of false positives I get, I feel confident in rarely looking through my junk mail to make sure something legitimate has not been marked. I have a few scripts that I run to check through the junk mail, but beyond that, my work is done.
    There are a number of reasons for this issue having become so important to me. I like to roam wirelessly about the countryside using my cell phone and laptop. While it is great that I am currently able to [ab]use SprintPCS's unlimited data policy, I don't like the idea that junk email is taking up my precious time and Sprint's precious network resources. So, it behooves me to find some way of keeping it from getting from the server to my client - and Pair's combination of SA and moving junk messages to a text file that I can later search is a great idea. Who knows whether the buffet style wireless internet service is here to stay. I know, though, that I don't want to contribute to its demise by the 300 plus junk email messages I had to download - just to see if I received any legitimate mail. The biggest problem still remains: how do we stop junk mail in the first place. I know there a lot of good ideas out there (the least of which is related to new laws*), but unfortunately, anyone who understands the way email is transmitted and received, knows that this will be a very time consuming and money consuming venture - i.e. to change the way email is transmitted around the world.
    At least us users can do our part in limiting the amount of time and bandwidth waste by using products like SA. For those of you not on Pair's network (or don't have a service which provides similar functionality), here are some clients that might help you on your own desktop:
- Windows: SAproxy
- OS X (raw - not for most users): Ben Trott, StupidFool.org - Installing Spam Assassin
- OS X does have a SA type of filtering agent built into its own Mail client
- Another non SA alternative for OS X: SpamSieve
If you are a Linux/*nix user, then the normal SA installation as outlined for different distros is the way to go. I won't get into detail here, as that wasn't the purpose of this commentary.
    So, this morning, when I went to open my email, I sighed a sigh of relief. 2 messages in my inbox. 2 legitimate messages from the Wall Street Journal... and that was it. Bliss...