Spam sucks.
I'm up to about 700 - 800 spam e-mails a day. It's partly because it's really easy to find me on the Web -- as a reporter, I've never disguised my identity. It's also because there are about five or six e-mail accounts I check on a regular basis. Whatever the reason, I'm sick and tired of it.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot the administrators at my company can do. Because we get tips from all sorts of sources, my boss and I are opposed to applying anything server-side to get rid of it, as we're always concerned that doing so will somehow filter out valuable communiques from our sources.
The best I've been able to manage thus far is to set up a horrendously complex but fairly effective rule in Entourage that grabs a whole bunch of the most annoying spam -- in particular, anything with a .PIF or .BAT attachment, so those morons that don't bother to use virus protection on their PCs have all their worm-garbage thrown into the trash immediately. Anything with "viagra," "penis" and the other usual suspect keywords in the title gets thrashed, and anything -- ANYTHING -- from Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com instantly goes in the bucket.
Doesn't stop the fact that the crap still comes in, though, which means my Mac is forced to digest each and every single bit of shit that comes in the door.
If I ever meet someone who's making a living by selling Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, I'm going to break some part of their body, I swear to God.
Comments
Mail.app is the only program I've ever used that deals with spam effectively. It's slow, it's buggy, its search feature is a joke, and it lacks several features for which I usually turn to a real e-mail client like Eudora... but I have almost completely forgotten that I receive junk mail. The trade-off is worth it... barely, but it's worth it. So far I don't regret it.
The down side is that I now realize how little *real* e-mail I actually get, and that's depressing.
Posted by: Corey | February 16, 2003 07:01 PM