I’ve had it up to *here* (waving my hand high over my head) with spam. Spam, spam, spam. I went an entire weekend without checking my e-mail, and the following Monday I was greeted with over 300 spam e-mails. Augh! Enough.
Matt has been talking about how he is almost spam free, and he has the perfect system set up to rescue me from my spam. “Save me!,” I cried, over and over again. Step 1 was that I needed to finally set up Spam Assassin. (As soon as I know the rest of the steps, I’ll write up the whole process and share.)
I had to do something before I started getting e-mail from people that supposedly saw me at work like Jennifer. I’ve never used Spam Assassin before. I guess I was afraid it would kill all of my good e-mail too. Somethinig like that, doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that my spam is being “Assassinated”. Well, ok. That and the points.
Each spam e-mail is assigned points basied on the contents of that spam message. The higher the points, the more spammy that spam content is. So now, as I delete them, I keep track of which one is the highest point spam message. Right now we’re sitting at 40.20 points, but that could be beat out any day now! What’s your highest spam points? Do I get a prize for this if I win?
16 replies on “Call Me The Assassinator!”
where do I go?! I want it too!
You might keep an eye out — if you start to get blank emails coming through, it could be spam assassain cutting them off… that’s why I stopped using it 🙁
You can set up Spam Assassin in your Control Panel for your hosting account. (http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) It’s under the option to manage e-mail accounts. You get the e-mails as attachments to the “point” e-mails. So far, it’s catching about 98% of my spam. As soon as I have the full system set up (this weekend) I’ll write up more on what I’m doing and how it works!
I’ve heard of people having problems with Spam Assassin, but so far so good – no blank ones yet in over 24 hours, and I’ve had a TON of spam come through!
I’ve been using it for several months and I’m pretty happy with the effectiveness. Trouble is, I had to adjust the tolerance so much to block out spam that sometimes it blocks out legit email, so I’m waiting with baited breath to see what the next step is.
In the meantime, I’m specifically having Spam Assassin ignore several email addresses that register as offenders even though the messages from them aren’t unsolicited. One particularly nasty offender came today, and it blows your high score out of the water. Check out the hits on this thing:
I win today!
Uhh, sorry about that. The thing that’s weird is it’s from a band, and their e-newsletter is so nasty it just sets off red flags, sirens, the works! You can imagine how ugly the message itself is.
95.8 points?!? Dude! You win! You win!
I just got a spam e-mail with the subject line to “Kick the Spam out of Christine’s Inbox”! How ironic is THAT?
I’ve had SpamAssassin turned on for a long time now, and I filter the spam straight to the trash. It’s great, but occasionally will stop working, and I have to go turn it off and on again to get it to kick in.
I used SpamAssassin for awhile, but got tired of it marking legit stuff and missing some stuff so I gave up. Now I use Cloudmark’s SpamNet, an Outlook plugin that relies on users to decide when something is spam. It’s caught every spam I’ve gotten since I started using it, and has only marked one legitimate email as spam. I like it so much, I’m considering buying the final version. (I started off as a beta tester, so right now I still have “unlimited” access via the beta version.)
I’ve used SpamAssassin since I moved to Blogomania. I lurv it! I’ve received two blank e-mails in that time, but I figure if it’s something important, the person will e-mail me back. Personally, I think it’s just a flukey e-mail that’s not really from someone. Maybe I’m wrong.
Anyhow, SA actually has a monthly contest for the highest points. It’s on their forums. The highest I’ve received so far is 56.30 I think. Some of the guys on the forums have 150+! Now THAT’S a lot of points. 🙂
“Kick the Spam out of Christine’s Inbox” — ironic and sort of scary, too. Makes me wonder to what lengths these spammers will go to learn our identities and what else.
Sorry, Mike is disqualified because if you look closely that’s a negative 95.8 which is pretty common considering he has a hit on “USER_IN_WHITELIST” which subtracts like a hundred points from everything else.
i am interested to hear how it works for you. i am totally inundadted with the stuff, i think mostly from posting on other people’s blogs that aren’t spam protected. anyway, i installed spamnet a couple of weeks ago and it is working ok, but i think i might need something more robust. 🙂
It’s a tragedy and everyone should know it.
Very entertaining read.
I got a highest score of 61.9 so far….