Digg ThisIn a previous post, I wondered about how certain types of SPAM end up in my email inbox.
I’m not really wondering how it got there, as I am fully aware of that (someone sent it to me, durrrrr…), and I’m not really wondering why.
I just find it interesting that an email with illegal characters (yes, those are illegal characters for email) can even get through the system. It just goes to demonstrate how broken the email system really is.
On a side note, those email were all sent in the year 2038. Talk about a time warp.
So I did some poking around, mostly over at Sam Spade, and a little research at places like arin.net, ripe.net and a few others, and collected some information.
No, I can’t share that information publicly here, as it will undoubtedly increase my SPAM level, already multiplied several-fold since that last post. Email me for the dirty details.
Suffice it to say that I’ve developed a nasty little blackhole for my email. It’s one of the nice things about owning your own domain. And the management console at mediatemple provides an excellent tool for accomplishing exactly this task.
I created a number of rules this afternoon that my server exercises when an email enters my inbox. If it sees one of the rules violated, it deletes the email.
And it works like a charm: from 100+ SPAM per day to zero.
Zero.
It is far more precise than the clumsy filtering tools available in Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage, and Outlook, which are more like trying to kill a cockroach with a sledgehammer — you do more damage to the floor around the roach than to the roach itself (that is, if you even manage to hit the roach in the first place!)
It also means that I now don’t receive email from a couple of areas in the world, namely Taiwan, South America, and a large portion of Denmark, but this doesn’t bother me as I don’t generally receive email from these areas at all — except for the SPAM, of course.
Funny, as it won’t work on comment spam, as about half of what filters through to Akismet comes from the US…
