Thoughts on Spam!

I have been using Cloudmark for a number of months. I have been pretty pleased with it. Every day I would get a handful of spams filtering through. Most suggesting that I needed a loan, a girl friend and anatomical enhancements. As Bob Metcalfe said at PopTech! how do they know?

I had also installed a Bayesian filter, which seems to have disappeared from Outlook mysteriously.

I was feeling pretty good about how all this stuff was working. However, every so often someone would complain that I hadn't responded to their E-Mail.

I was always a bit incredulous as I feel like I live in E-Mail and as part of the ActiveWords team, we have a mission to respond to everything as quickly as possible. I also would read and hear that others were being bombarded with Spam, and I thought my system is working, hence I don't care. I had also seen other systems where you had to get permissions, white lists, black lists, yada-yada.

That's the good news, now the bad. Today I was working off site, and I needed for the first time in a long while to access my E-Mail to see whether I had gotten a response on a matter. So, I went to webmail from Earththink, my DSL ISP, and found that there were slightly more than 2,500 spam E-Mail messages waiting there.

Whoa, what a wake up call! Did I take the time dig through them? No chance! Just dumped them, and resolved that if Earththink was catching them, then I might miss a few, but wouldn't miss a lot!

Next case as they say.