A primary constant in my life is spam. For several years now, it has dominated my e-mail, and I have been forced to adapt in order for e-mail to remain a useful communications medium. First I just erased the spam, and then, in late 2001, I started using SpamBouncer, which filed all spam in a special UCE folder. At the time, I was getting 10-20 pieces of spam a day to my personal account. Six months later when incomg spam had increased from 20-30 each day, I switched to SpamAssassin, which does the same thing that SpamBouncer did, only much better. With the Great Spam Explosion of Late 2002, I was forced to take more drastic action, and started using various blacklists of mail servers, to prevent spammers from getting their messages through to my server in the first place. Because of this, spam pretty much leveled off at around 80 per day for a while and then, last summer, leapt up to around 140 messages per day. I made the mail server blocking a bit harsher, but that didn’t help with the slow climb to the November 150-per-day average. Sick of pawing through my spam folder, I seriously beefed up the mail server blocking, and spam went down to ~60 messages per day by January. Then — wham it shot up to ~250 per day in early February, though that data is skewed somewhat by mail that could be viruses masquerading as spam, or vice-versa. I tightened down a bit more, but, inevitably, started losing legitimate messages.
Sunday, I got sick of it all. Late last night, I set SpamAssassin to erase anything that looks like spam, and send the small percentage of stuff that’s kinda spammy to my UCE folder.
In the past 24 hours, I have gotten two pieces of spam in my UCE folder. Two. That’s it. Throughout the day, dubious of my newfound peace, I have read through my server’s spam-processing logs, to make sure that legitimate mail isn’t getting erased. It’s not.
This may not be the ideal way to use e-mail, but it’s about the only way that I’m willing to use it, at this point.