Comments on: Review: I Hate Spam and So Do You!

By: Sunbelt in the News

Sunbelt in the News — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:49:45 +0000

[...] Gear Diary: Review: I Hate Spam and So Do You! [...]

By: bitbank

bitbank — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:35:02 +0000

Doug,
With POBOX you get a daily report and you can pull filtered email out of the spam box and whitelist addresses. It allows total control of how your email is filtered. Give it a try.

L.B.

By: Doug Goldring

Doug Goldring — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:56:47 +0000

Bitbank, I am not sure that is a better option, either. I don’t like the loss of control (do you get a report of what was filtered?) or sending all of my mails through a private server. What if they get hacked? What about my privacy? Who else is looking?

I like server side filtering, but I also want to maintain control over it. I have too many emails from my bank or paypal, or other people with my personal information to trust that entirely.

Doug

By: Outlook Spam Filter - Free Download

Outlook Spam Filter - Free Download — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:13:10 +0000

[...] Year: 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 News Articles for 2008 Gear Diary: Review: I Hate Spam and So Do You! Mar 7, [...]

By: bitbank

bitbank — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:53:03 +0000

The system you’re describing isn’t the best solution. You want the spam stopped BEFORE it comes into your machine. I have been using POBOX for the past 10 years and it’s a great system. It’s an email forwarding service that costs $20 per year (they give you a permanent email address) and it does an excellent job of filtering spam. I receive on average 200 spams per day and it lets maybe 1-2 slip through. The true advantage comes when I grab my mail on my phone and don’t have to sit through receiving all of the junk. POBOX gets five stars from me.

Larry B.

By: Doug Goldring

Doug Goldring — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:48:57 +0000

Thanks, guys. I agree, Gmail has about the best server side filter ever. I have just never gotten around to sorting things out that way. Maybe I will now that Augie has given me the link.

Doug

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:45:25 +0000

2 out of five, that’s a really high ratio, that would drive me bonkers

By: Mitchell Oke

Mitchell Oke — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:57:13 +0000

Spam filtering is one of the reasons I love Gmail. Sure the odd one slips through, but only a few a week, while the number of spam in the Spam folder continues to mount. Being server side, it means whatever device I access it on it’s spam free.

I’d have to get something like this if I wasn’t a Gmail user, spam drives me nuts!

By: Augie

Augie — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:25:48 +0000

Doug, I think you can let Gmail access and check you POP3 account, which would probably, in turn, filter those messages for you, that way you can check it on your Mogul from Gmail…

…actually, I just checked.. here’s the link..

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21288

a question I think you might ask is if Gmail would leave a copy of the message on the original server so that your computer would be able to get the messages too… I haven’t got that far in researching it

By: Doug Goldring

Doug Goldring — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:12:54 +0000

Thanks, Augie. I have to admit that I do not use Craig’s List, so I have never had this problem.

My biggest problem now is that it has become very glaring how much spam I get when I use my Mobile device, and have 53 messages (51 of which are spam). I really do wish there was a mobile version of this one.

Oh and just one sidenote. Every spam screenshot in this email was a real spam message which I received an was filtered by iHate Spam.

doug

By: Augie

Augie — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:06:54 +0000

on a side note… I hate spam too; not email spam though (I’ve got that under control with Gmail), but spam postings on Craigslist.
There’s no program to deal with it, only user intervention.

18 messages getting though is good if you’re getting over 50 a day normally.

By: Doug Goldring

Doug Goldring — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:30:13 +0000

Dang, you are fast, Wayne.

I have to say, I was extremely impressed by iHate Spam. And, since you have the benefit of the whole community, the more users you have the better protection you will get.

Oh yeah, and I was also shocked when I looked at my stats and saw I had only manually processed 18 Spam messages.

Very impressive! And only $20.

Doug

By: Wayne Schulz

Wayne Schulz — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:22:59 +0000

Only 18 spams throughout your test is pretty impressive. I consider GMAIL’s filters one of the best — and I bet 4 to 5 slip through each day.

Another trick that I’ve used in situations where I had a device that did not have the ability to use a spam solution — is to forward my email to a spamcop.net address ($30/yr but worth it) – then out in turn Spamcop.net lets you forward the email to yet another address.

In the early days when I was just starting to use a Blackberry, I would forward email to spamcop.net (they give you an address xxx@spamcop.net) — which in turn allows you to forward that email out to another address (the trick is that this email is scraped of all spam).

It was quite effective and eliminated nearly all the spam (as good as any) — as I recall it had a few more false positives than normal.

These days with the spam solutions becoming so effective it’s a wonder that these guys still make money (though I think all the money is being made in illegal sales of prescriptions and/or fraudulent stuff).