Spam

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and one thing I am not thankful for is Spam.

Jeff Petkau told me about Spambayes so I decided to try it out.

I get about 50 spam emails a day - considerably less than Bill Gates, who is said to get 4,000,000 a day. (His email address has always been billg@microsoft.com.) I suspect they authenticate email from inside Microsoft so at least internal mail gets to him. Steve Ballmer said in an interview that "almost a whole department is dedicated to filtering Bill's email."

Even with Spambayes, which is pretty good, I still get about four emails a day into my main inbox and then about 15 a day that are marked by Spambayes as "almost Spam."

Spambayes works well enough that I've gone back to publishing my email address: stephen at above-the-garage.com without resorting to replacing "@" with " at " and that sort of thing.  [Update in 2025 - not any more!]

I still say that if they would just make getting an email certificate from Verisign or whoever cost $1.00 a year then we could all just set our email programs to accept certified email only and the problem would be solved. But at $15.00 a year it's just too much to ask.

Oh well. This problem will be handled in the next year or two.

© 2004 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.