I had posted the inquiry about possibly creating a SPAM filter. I have
been getting *at least* 7-8 spam messages a day lately, with the rate
increasing lately.
I *have* posted to the Usenet, in various groups, with my real email
address. Not so much for a few months, but pretty frequently before
about then. In that context, I *want* to use my real address, because I
fairly frequently receive correspondences based on posts, of a sort I am
happy to get (and sometimes result in longer "offline" conversations).
But I suppose that is likely to be the source of most of my spam also.
Maybe a few web sites that I have provided an email address to, for
things that seemed like a legitimate purpose, also leaked their address
lists in various ways.
After my post, I received a helpful private correspondence from T.
Muddletin (who sometimes has posted here). His/her suggestion was
rather simple, and rather clever. I feel that I should have thought of
it myself. The idea was to use the FILTER program, and set up several
rules that directed messages to each of your legitimate addresses to
INBOX. This should include actual email addresses you hold, as well
list addresses that you know you receive legitimately. After all those
INBOX rules, have a final 'z-SPAM' rule (alphabetically the last rule)
that directs everything else to a SPAMBOX folder (or just deletes it).
I've tried this for a few days, and found about 90% success in keeping
SPAM out of my INBOX. So far, only one borderline-legitimate message
got directed to SPAMBOX (although it was not anything I would have
genuinely cared about having deleted automatically). The upshot is that
this simple setup probably solves my problem within a sufficient
threshhold not to need a seperate filter program. Maybe I'll still
write one just to play with the code, but it does't matter so much now.
Yours, Lulu...
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