11/23 2004 – After a recent change of hosting companies, the amount of spam that makes it through to my inbox is just a fraction of what it used to be.
The web hosting company currently hosting this site (Datakultur.com*) has an optional server-side spam filter, that really does the job. Combined with the built-in junk filter in Apple’s Mail.app this has resulted in an almost clean inbox!
The server-side filtering is based on points. Odd backgrounds, known spam hosts, stop words, malformatted mail headers, all these mail anomalies gets points. When a certain threshold is met, the incoming mail is stamped as spam. *****SPAM***** is added to the mail subject. A typical spam mail will look like this when it arrives in my mail client: *****SPAM***** WE HAVE 1300 SOFTWARES FOR U TO DOWNLOAD NOW near mentioned climb . An X-flag is allso set (X-Spam-Flag: YES). Nice, isn’t it. Just as if the spammers announced that their mail only contains junk.
Furthermore, if incoming spam gets acchieves enough spam points, the server-side application kills the mail. In this case I never even see it!
Of course, Mail.app, my local mail client is quick to recognize the spam-stamped mails as junk, and accordingly sends these straight to the spam folder. And since I only get about 50 of these daily, instead of the thousands of spam mails received from my former hosting company**, I can now take the time to actually check the contents of my junk basket. This is actually cruisial, at least for me, since lots of people send me samples of iscam mails and stupid spam. With the old hosting company and the flood of spam received via them, I rarely took the time to manually check for any legitimate email messages. Instead, I just deleted all of it once or twice a day.
* Datakultur.com, is a Swedish hosting company located in Malmö in southern Sweden.
** Song Networks