Unix Tip: Coping with spam

While the volume of SPAM doesn't surprise me, the brainless character of most of the email I receive always leaves me perplexed. Take the recent spate of "It me " SPAM. I received several dozen of these or more one morning. What was the point? Even if I were naive enough to be tempted to read a message from Brian Thomas with the subject line "It me Brian", I would immediately lose interest when that email is surrounded by "It me Karen", "It me Jose", "It me Bud" and dozens of similar messages. What does it take for an email client to recognize SPAM and why can't these floods of innocuous SPAM be recognized and diverted from my inbox? Who does SPAM control well?

GMAIL and SPAM

Of all the mail clients that I use, including one at work, two personal email accounts and several email clients associated with web sites that I manage, the best for SPAM control is GMAIL. In fact, though I don't spend much time thinking about this, GMAIL is nearly 100% accurate in determining what is SPAM and what is not. If I look at my SPAM box, I don't see any messages which fall into the "false positive" (were marked as SPAM, but are legitimate messages). In fact, I've grown so confident of the reliability of GMAIL's spam detector that I rarely look over the email in my SPAM box. It's become a waste of my time to do so. Similarly, I rarely receive anything in my inbox that isn't legitimate. There may be many messages that I don't want and that I delete without opening, but rarely any that I own responsibility for their arrival.

SPAM Tagging

Another of my email accounts implements SPAM tagging and allows me to select a level between 1 and 10 to indicate how aggressively the email software should be in condemning messages that arrive in my inbox as potential SPAM. At the most aggressive setting, the messages are automatically deleted. I never see what was sent and probably lose a legitimate piece of email every now and then. Even with a very aggressive SPAM setting, however, more than 90% of the email that makes it into my inbox is of the "It me Bob" variety. Given that this email provider offers only a very restrictive amount of disk space (10 MB) for each account, cleaning out the SPAM from my inbox has become a constant chore.

Anti-SPAM Software

For $20-$40, many anti-spam products are available to help fight off the annoying flood of junk messages. With names like SpamEater, Spam Killer and Spam Buster, these products offer a variety of features such as the ability to block certain email and IP addresses or certain servers. This is the "blacklist" approach to spam busting. Many also offer "whitelist" services -- allowing only certain email, IP addresses or servers to make it into your inbox. The nicer products also have some way to set your level or tolerance (i.e., how aggressive the software should be in stamping out SPAM) and how captured SPAM is handled -- whether it is deleted or quarantined. These products will generally work with the more popular email clients (e.g., Outlook and Eudora). Some work with Yahoo and AOL as well. Most work on Windows systems.

A lot of good anti-spam filters have been developed for Linux users. Among the best known of these are SpamAssassin and bogofilter.

For web-based email, there's a limited amount that a user can do beyond complain when the installed spam filtering isn't doing a good job or move to a different provider. Probably the best thing that I can say about GMAIL is that I didn't have to do anything. My inbox is clean, my spam box seems to fill up with all the junk I don't want to be wading through (and automatically deletes the SPAM after 30 days). That's really quite amazing when I stop to think about it, especially for a free email account. That's really quite amazing.