I’m Getting Ahead of Spam. Never thought it possible!

I’m actually finding that I’m getting ahead of my incoming spam load. I get easily 800+ a day at intake end of my inbox. That is reduced by at least 50% by custom rules that I’ve added to my Kerio mailserver. (These rules have to be updated daily with new phrases, but they are quite effective.) And Kerio mailserver has additional behaviors that it uses to reduce spam – together they either bounce or tag most of the incoming spam.

Then another 50% of those that remain are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin (a server-based solution). And finally, each morning I go to webmail and look at incoming messages there, tagging the obvious spam and deleting it, before I have Entourage [Microsoft Office] pull my mail down to the computer. The personal webmail examination step requires 30 minutes of my time every morning, because I’ve gotta look at every title,  but while I’m doing it, SpamAssassin is learning how to recognize today’s spammer tricks.

When Entourage picks it up, it uses SpamSieve (a Mac program that uses Bayesian filtering) to additionally filter the mail, and that catches almost everything else. I probably have to delete another 25 by hand from my inbox during the course of the day, and SpamSieve “learns” how to filter those out for tomorrow.

Interestingly, I miss the spam. The number of actual messages that I’m left with in my inbox to really read is maybe 50 a day. I still triage and only answer those that are ultra important right away, and my average turnaround time to respond is probably 24 to 48 hours for everything else. But I’m feeling like this filtering is finally effective for me.