Mudita Journal

SPAM Solutions

October 12, 2003 · Filed under: Current Events, Personal
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I can relate to Diana Hsieh’s frustration with finding a good solution to the spam problem.

Last year I had to give up my cherished joshua at zader dot com address due to the daily avalanches of spam. And I just finished changing my address again this year to shake the half-dozen or so daily spammers who’ve somehow gotten hold of my new address. This time I will be more careful.

To add insult to injury, today when I tried sending everyone in my addressbook an announcement that I was changing my address, my ISP vetoed my message. Why? Because it looked like I was sending spam! Sheesh…. And of course I’ve been experiencing regular difficulties sending out announcements to the Atlasphere distribution list for the same reason.

Today I also canceled my account with SpamArrest, an evenly-broken challenge-response spam filtering system that I’d been paying to use for several months in a failed effort to recover joshua at zader dot com. SpamArrest certainly cuts out the spam; but the daily ritual of sifting through hundreds of spam messages, to ferret out the inevitable handful of senders who don’t respond to the challenge e-mail, was a drag. And to make matters worse, SpamArrest has been down so much lately that it seems I can’t even retrieve my sanitized mail much of the time.

On the bright side, I’ve had very good luck in recent months with creating disposable e-mail forwarding accounts (e.g., southwest at zader dot com for my Southwest airlines e-updates — the customer service reps get a kick out of that one when I give it to them). These temporary accounts have the very real advantages of (a) being easy to turn off at a moment’s notice and (c) allowing me to easily discover who sells my address and who doesn’t. (FWIW, Southwest has been perfectly noble about it all.)

Lastly, I’ve been seriously considering a switch away from Eudora (who’s come out with a new upgrade they’d like me to pay for, but has generally been weak with their innovations in recent years) in favor of Bloomba, which is not only developed by Objectivist entrepreneur Raymie Stata‘s Stata Labs, but also sports Stata Labs’ SAProxy, which is Consumer Reports’ top-rated spam filter.

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  • Rick Minto

    SAproxy … Yes! It’s a very nice spamkiller. It will work with any POP3 client, Eudora included. I even use it with stunnel to get an SSL link to my AT&T accnt. I only wish that the threshold parameter for the Bayesian filter was adjustable. It seems to be fixed at 5.0. It’s only $9.95 through end of Nov. with the promo code.

    Bloomba looks promising, but feature-wise it is lacking in spots. Distribution list creation and maintenance for one.

  • Tom Moyer

    Can you tell me the promo code you alluded to for…
    “SAproxy … It’s only $9.95 through end of Nov. with the promo code.”
    from your 10/12th article?? Thanks.

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