SPAM Project

McAfee recently did an experiment where they provided 50 people with email addresses and had them reply to or click on every spam they got. Here is one woman's story of her experience.

Spamato and Thunderbird

For the last 10 years or so I've had to change my email address every 2-3 years because the spam became unmanageable. I tried using disposable email for each place I put my email but it's a huge pain in the butt to have to create an alias and set it up each time a site wants an email address.

So I started using collective disposable emails. I would use the same address for a bunch of places and then change it when the spam got too bad. I kept my personal addresses separate. The problem is that there are a few emails I actually want to see in the thousands of spams and unless I go to every single site and update my reg info I won't get those if I just toss the whole address.

Recently, overwhelmed by unmanageable spam and frustrated with deleting mail constantly from my Treo I downloaded and installed Spamato for Thunderbird. It works pretty well, and is highly customizable, but it is missing a few features that would make it really top-notch.

I have it set to need 3 spam rule matches to mark a message as spam. The highest number of matches I've ever seen has been 5 out of 8. Some of my valid messages come in as 3s or 4s though. I don't know if Spamato checks my address book but if it doesn't, that would be a really neat feature. Any email from anyone in my address book is automatically OK.

The other problem is that once I sort through the incoming mail and make sure it is all junk I still need to delete it from the server manually. This is more a Thunderbird issue, but I would like to ability to delete mail from the Trash and the server or just from the Trash. Everything I confirm as Junk is deleted from the server, and everything else that is deleted and is not junk stays on the server.

The last thing that would be nice is a better way to sort messages in the logs. It is in the Spamato logs that you can mark ham as spam or vice versa. Currently I have to search through the log, so adding filter options to filter by date, subject, sender, etc. would make my life a lot easier.

If anyone knows of any better spam filters let me know. I don't want to have to continue to change my email address every few years however, even with Spamato, I still have to delete email from my Treo if I want to get the valid emails when I am not in the office.

I also get a ton of IM spam but one thing at a time...