Separating ham and spam

RE you familiar with the misfortunate ordeals where you must cope with uninvited mail from a solicited source? What happens when this recurs, as in the case of getting mail that is directly or indirectly bound to a ‘newsletter’? Such newsletters are often hard to unsubscribe from.

I typically just bin such messages automatically rather than bothering to unsubscribe. Why? Experience suggests that it is the easier solution. Some companies voluntarily ‘decide’ to subscribe you and make unsubscription paths difficult and/or poorly tested. Call that “aggressive” if you will. Such messages ought to go to spam@your_domain, which can be emptied every day/week/month after a quick eye glance. Filtering based on headers is a true friend in such circumstances and, if done properly, no false positives (improper spam detection applied to real messages) should follow.

I do not like the idea the idea of re-directing mail to dev/null (i.e. deleting it immediately). Some people whom I know actually do that without hesitation; they particularly enjoy saving files under /dev/null as there is infinite free space there! The thought of something going amiss without the recipient’s awareness (perhaps a false positive) is worrisome. I tend to worry too much. I even check at queue of my BoxTrapper (Challenge/Response filter) at the end of each month, only to find merely nothing which is of use, among heaps of junk. That said, Challenge/Response filters have a few problems. On my domains, there are 5 accounts that which are protected by Apache’s BoxTrapper and merely all messages that get trapped are spam that refuses to verify its genuineness. So why should one bother? I still bother; I just punish no-one but myself.

Related item: Genuine Uninvited Mail

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 8:52 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.