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[PLUG] interesting solution to spam overload
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As I've mentioned here before I'm seeing greatly increasing levels of
spam and I'm having a hard time dealing with it. I stumbled across
and interesting solution that is quite effective and it's all because
of PECO.
This week the new power lines on our street were scheduled to be
activated (which is good - I think Tesla himself strung the old ones
and hand-crafted the transformer.) I normally access my email remotely
using the Horde webmail package on my firewall server but that would
not be available to me when I'm out working and the power is off at
home.
Therefore, I told people that if they needed to contact me during the
4 hour power outage just send an email to my infrequently used gmail
account. I normally use fetchmail to pop the email from gmail so I
very rarely use the browser interface. When I logged on to gmail I
noticed that there were 176 spams in my spam folder. Since they
are automatically deleted after 30 days that is a month worth of spam
for my single, rarely-used gmail account. Also, none of them was a
false positive. Hummm, this (admittedly small) sample was looking good!
Then, the flash of insight hit me! I'll send ALL my email to my gmail
account and POP it from there. That way, I'll use the (apparently)
excellent spam filtering capability of gmail and, as a bonus, all my
email will be in one place when I'm on the road and unable to access
my workstation.
As a test I set that up last night from the hosting company server. Right
now the spam folder is up to 568. Less than 24 hours. Oh, there were
a few that got through to my inbox today... 3 of them. I'll have to
investigate how that happened :-)
I'm quite happy with this turn of events. I'll test for a few more days
and if it's as trouble-free as the test indicates then I'm shutting down
my fetchmail and Horde for good and just sending everything to gmail.
If you're swamped with spam it might be worth checking out gmail.
Eric
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Eric A Lucas
# "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth
# And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...
# -- John Gillespie Magee Jr.
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