Spam

Ian Holsman comments on a vacation responder that deletes all incoming email to avoid their mailbox overflowing while they’re away and asks if email is dead. The answer is a clear no. Email is now a critical system, it just can’t be killed, perhaps morphed into a different set of protocols but the concept of sending mail electronically just can’t die, unless you count being replaced with sending video messages electronically as killing email. However, email is no longer a time saver, it’s a great time waster. It’s a chore that you have to put up with to stay in business or to stay in touch with your widely dispersed friends. With the recent demise of our exchange mail server I’ve had to change the way I filter out spam which requires training up a new spam filter and in the process receiving massive amounts of spam. I honestly never realised just how much spam I received until I suddenly didn’t have a filter in place to get rid of it. Without that filter, email is completely unusable and with a poorly trained filter it’s a great waste of time. We’ve now outsourced our exchange server and I can go back to happily using SpamBayes with Outlook. I’ve run it over the 14000 stored spam messages that I managed to recover from our dead exchange box (massive amounts of real email got nuked, but the spam survived….) and trained up the new filter, but it’s still not as good. I’m not sure why. I’ve also found that when you receive large amounts of spam the best thing you can do for your productivity is turn off the new email notification. Noone notices if it takes you 30 mins to reply to an email instead of 5 mins and by turning off that notification you’re no longer interrupted by spam messages (or real messages) every 1-5 minutes. You check you’re email when you want not when it wants. Also, by leaving your email open you still have a reminder on screen to pay attention to email every so often and it’s quick and easy to bring the window back up and check if you have new email. The other thing you need to do is have a really huge amount of space available in your mailbox, whether that’s achieved by actually having a large mailbox or just having a fetchmail (or similar) process running to constantly download your mail to your own computer for storage, it’s got to be there. That avoids the problem of spam filling up your in box. Finally, train your spam filter to treat any bounce message as spam and discard it. At least 50% of the unwanted email I get is actually bounce messages either for incorrect addresses or virus detection notifications. If you’re a system administrator, turn off all bounce messages, they no longer serve any useful purpose and are just clogging up people’s inboxes.