I Get No Spam
After hearing a couple complaints from friends about the amount of spam they’re getting, I decided to take a quick look to see where I stood. At the risk of setting myself up, I should say that I get no spam (channeling John C. Dvorak). Or at least very little–maybe one every other day gets through to my inbox.
I think the trick is just to have multiple levels of filtering. I use a Gmail address for most online transactions (for online transactions that I really don’t care about–if I’m doing a one-time registration just to get a trial key, for example–I use my Yahoo address, which is nothing but a spam bucket). My Gmail address gets forwarded to my personal email address (@footle.org), which has SpamAssassin running on the server. If it makes it past SA to Mail.app, it gets inspected by SpamSieve, an awesome Bayesian spam filter for OS X mail clients.
Anyway, my stats for the last 24 hours:
- Server-level filters (spam caught):
- SpamAssassin: 281
- Gmail: 32
- Client-level filter (spam caught):
- SpamSieve: 17
- Spam getting to my inbox: 0
- Non-spam messages: 52
- False positives: 1 (just Flavorpill, so not a big deal)
(Wow…330 pieces of spam in a single day. That seems way worse than when I last checked.)