Alioth's Journal: Spam

Spam is really getting beyond a joke, now.

SpamAssassin filtered over 300 messages from my inbox on one day last week (the first time it's broken 300) and about 30 to 40 make it past the filter. Most other days in the last couple of weeks, it's been filtering around 250 a day. This is AFTER mail has passed through Spamhaus's SBL-XBL, which looking at server logs as a whole, rejects around 50% of all incoming email - my personal mail address is probably subjected to around 600 spam emails per day. If I ignore the couple of mailing lists I use, and count only personally addressed email, less than 0.5% of my email is actaully legitimate.

I've had my current email address for a long time, and I'm loathed to change it, but it's either do that or simply abandon email altogether. The trouble is informing everyone of the change. I would like to put an autoreply instructing people who may still have the old address that it's changed and to phone/text for the new one but this would subject people to backscatter (forged From: headers that point at real addresses).

You could...

[Short Circuit]

...try Google Apps for Domains. Get Google's filtering with your existing email address. In my gmail account, I get 4000 messages in my spambox per month, and 570 legit emails in my inbox per month. Perhaps 30 spams per month get through, for a miss rate of 0.75%. While that's nowhere near your ham/spam ratio, I'd say it's worth a try. An email address should be as close to permanent as possible.