05/05/2007

Holy cow, the spam is all but gone!

For years I’ve been dealing with e-mail spam. I’ve reconfigured my mail servers, installed software and filters, and come up with increasingly clever rulesets and parsing scripts to block the deluge. In general I’ve been pretty successful, but on an average day I probably receive well over a hundred legitimate e-mail messages, and since I do so much work and commerce online, my address is on untold numbers of spam lists, so if I didn’t do anything at all I suspect I’d have several thousand spam messages a day.

After several abortive attempts, I wrote a software program to perform something called “greylisting”, and tested it for a couple of days to make sure it works. (I did this because installing it on my mail server affects a couple hundred customers and several thousand e-mail accounts I’m running.) I finally took the plunge today and installed it, and I think I received a single spam message all day. Woo hoo!

Of course it’s Saturday, and e-mail traffic seems to be a bit lower on the weekend, but I’m hopeful that next week I’ll finally be able to hop online in the morning and not delete a hundred messages before work.