May 10, 2007 will

Spam spam spam

I hate it so much. I've had willmcgugan.com for many years, and in the early days I was complacent about posting my email address in newsgroups / BBs etc. Consequently I get an impressive amount of spam. I use SpamBayes, which worked great in the beginning, but now training it seems almost as much effort as deleting the spam manually.

Since I can't nuke the spammers from orbit, I've restricted my email address to . Unfortunately this means that you will no longer be able to email me at studmuffin@willmcgugan.com or youreallyrockmyworldiwanttohaveyourbabies@willmcgugan.com (sorry). I have also enabled SPF on my domain. I'm not exactly clear on what that is, but easydns.com claim it will cut down on spam, so I am giving it a go.

If you are reading this within 24 hours of the post, please send me a brief test email. If you don't get a brief test reply by tomorrow, then please post a comment to let me know.

And if you have any other tips for reducing spam - let me know!

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Samat Jain

Enabling SPF on your domain doesn't cut down on the spam you receive, it's an altruistic thing to make sure when you send e-mail, others can verify that it came from you.

You can enable SPF checking on your e-mail server or client, but since most domains still don't have SPF records setup, the actual benefit is pretty close to nil...

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Will

Thanks for the explanation!

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manuelg

I find SpamBayes works best behind a more traditional spam filter that is set to "low" sensitivity.

I can then rely on SpamBayes to even rescue some email that I thought was spam on first glance.

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Chui

Will,

Try signing up for the free Google Apps for Domains. They'll host your mail server, and allow you to POP and SMTP. They also have a pretty decent spam filter.

Chui