kevinhiggins.org

YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS LEGALIZE SPAM... IN YOUR INTEREST, OF COURSE

YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS LEGALIZE SPAM... IN YOUR INTEREST, OF COURSE

http://www.cauce.org/news/index.shtml

The bottom line is that the legislature (especially ours) will not solve this problem. The system will not be re-architected or overhauled to defend against this onslaught any time soon. Changing or attacking the business model that supports spam is unlikely to be an achievable goal for such a worldwide phenomena.

The best thing you can do is to help educate people to cease being profitable targets for spammers, and help them setup the defense that, like any other computer-security approach is layered and simple enough to use to be effective.

For me, that's POPFile and Outlook 2003 (gasp--yep, plain old MS Outlook).

POPFile, for me is 99.54% accurate for my work email addresses and 99.18% accurate for my personal email address--both of which, interestingly enough, suffer from about 24% of all received email being spam.

Cooly enough, of the the fraction of a percent of spam that DOES get through POPFile, Outlook 2003 identifies about 90%. As a result, in the last week, despite receiving on the order of 200+ spam emails a day (I have email addresses I've used for almost ten years), I've only had 4-5 actually make it past POPFile and outlook 2003 into my in-box. And with Outlook 2003's properties that prevents me from loading embedded HTML images from senders I have not explicitly approved, my looking at THOSE "surviving" spam did not signal to the spammers that their message was ever viewed by anyone.

Your mileage may vary, but for me it's about as good as it gets.

I paid to register Postal Inspector / Spam Inspector...but instead I now use POPFile, which is free (donorware) and open source. (The Outlook choice is a business necessity).

Posted by khiggins at December 9, 2003 11:24 PM | TrackBack