Spamless At Last
After 12 years with the same email address, I had finally reached a spam-crisis. I was filtering heavily, but even my filters were choking. At the suggestion of Paul Boutin, I've been experimenting recently with spamarrest, and though it took a couple of hours to tweak, I've been really pleased ever since. Spamarrest uses a challenge/response system to verify human correspondents, and has been catching all the spam. I imported a list of authorized correspondents that I made from my Eudora outbox (with some editing), so many emailers never see the challenge. New correspondents have to hit an intermediate Web page, but thereafter they are cleared. I understand that this offloads my effort onto the emailers, which is a little unfair, especially when they are merely responding to an email I may have sent. Therefore, I try to pre-authorize anybody I write to, say if I am trying to set up an interview. It's a neat solution that has been around for a very long time, and now that I'm using it I can't imagine why I waited.
Published on August 24, 2006