Aldoblog

SpamSieve, by far the best anti-spam email tool I’ve used, was updated to version 2.3 yesterday. The biggest change listed was increased accuracy, due to improvements in the tokenizers and parsers. John Gruber reported that the beta versions were running at 99.9% accuracy for him, which is several tenths of a percent above where I’d peaked.

When you get more than one thousand spams a week, you live for a couple of tenths of a percent improvements. I of course upgraded immediately.

For many years, Rochelle used Netscape Communicator for her email. A little over a year ago, I switched her to Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the code and user-interface successor to Communicator. For the most part it works very well, but it has one astonishing omission: its anti-virus capabilities are terrible.

When I converted this site to WordPress, I decided to turn on commenting, and see what happened. I have gotten a fair number of really good comments, and from people I didn’t know, which was cool. I also got a ton of comment spam (most of which never made it online). Not cool.

So I did a few things about it.

2004 was a big year for spam, after Congress voted to make it legal at the end of 2003. The result: spam increased sharply in 2004. But in my own, more personal battles with spam I’ve been more successful at holding back the tide.

As I have been working on this site, I’ve visited quite a few other weblogs run by WordPress, and occasionally see something that I’d like to know how to do myself. A little widget here, a list of related posts there, etc. Cool things, but nothing that says how to do them. So, if anyone ever has that thought about my site, here’s the info. (Hopefully other WordPress users will do this for their sites.)

I spent a couple of hours yesterday working on a few last lingering details for this site. The main changes I wanted to make were to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (a minor security update), make sure I was using the latest version of the Kubrick template (I was), and most importantly, fix the problems I was having with the Kubrick comments form.

In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.

So, with the end of the first half of the year, I thought break my silence by taking another look at the level of spam flowing into my mailboxes, and how well my tools are coping with it.

With Q1-2004 coming to a close, I thought I’d take a look at my spam situation, which has been escalating out of control. Since 12:01am January 1, 2004 I have received 22,255 spam messages via e-mail. That’s more than 250 a day, every day, for the last 89 days. Earlier in the year, the daily average was lower, which means that in the last couple weeks it’s gone well above 250 per day. In spite of these numbers, I have two things that give me hope.

I have over the last two years implemented, I think, a dozen different anti-spam technologies to protect my Inbox. (I’ll total them up and summarize my thoughts in another post.) Today I finished implemented yet another, called SPF, or Sender Permitted From.