[AccessD] OT Friday: Comodo AntiSpam

Good for you, John.  I will be interested to hear how it works out for you.

When I got your email asking for my self-validation, I thought it was an 
idea with a lot of merit.  I still do.  But, since then, I have looked 
at it a bit more closely, and see that Comodo has been around for quite 
a long time.  So the fact that this is my first contact with the 
concept, answers my question about whether the idea will catch on!  :-)

For myself, almost all of the emails I send are to people I know, and 
most of the legitimate email I receive is from people I know.  For those 
new people who are emailing me for the first time, it does not seem to 
be too onerous a request to have an automated system ask them to 
validate themselves before I accept their first email.

On the other hand, I can see how a lot of people would find it 
irritating.  Oh well...

In the meantime, see my reply to Lambert elsewhere in this thread, about 
getting Gmail to launder the mail for you.  I found this very quick and 
easy to set up.  Possibly *too* effective though, I'lll have to wait and 
see - even this very post from you that I'm replying to was spam-dunked 
by Gmail, and I had to fish it out of the bin.

Regards
Steve

P.S.  I have been around this forum only a relatively short amount of 
time, so don't know the full meaning of the term, but was nonetheless 
amused by the word "colbyizing". :-)  I assume getting colbyized takes 
different forms in different situations?


jwcolby wrote:
> I find it amusing that anyone takes the time to generate a 10 page "why CR
> is bad", the basis of many of which is "it should punish the spammer", as if
> ANYONE has a way to do that.  My personally opinion is that hunting down and
> colbyizing a handful of them VERY publicly would be the only effective
> deterrent but that won't be happening either.
> 
> Additionally, so far I have never had email delivered to me because someone
> spoofed my email address as the sender of spam and a CR system was bouncing
> it back to me.  Given that my name is on the spam lists (I get spam) THAT
> argument isn't keeping me up at night.  I did not design the wonky system
> that allows spammers to spoof senders and I can not do anything about others
> doing so.
> 
> In the meantime, I have at most 100 people in my address books, all of which
> have already been picked up (automatically) by the system.  The rest are
> trickling in and I am manually dealing with them.  Within a single week all
> of my regular emails will be handled.
> 
> I used a Bayesian filter with outlook and tried to do so again but it
> wouldn't install.  When it worked, it worked fairly well (98% rate) but had
> false positives and false negatives, few but still there.  Having 2% hiding
> in the 100 is almost worse than 50%.  You have to look at each one to find
> the 2 in 100 that you need to recover.  THAT is as much of a PITA as just
> hitting the delete key 50 times a day. 
> 
> There are a million systems out there for handling spam, none of them
> perfect.  I have tried about 500,000 of them so far, I know none of them are
> perfect.
> 
> Of course if any of you fine folks wants to volunteer to set up and maintain
> an email server / AntiSpam system on my server machine, or install your
> favorite variation of Linux and your favorite variation of anti spam, please
> take my invitation to do so.  I do have a beater box (not even so beater)
> and I will give you remote access to the box in order to do your thing.  Of
> course YOU will be responsible for all maintenance for the rest of your
> life.  I have real work to do unfortunately.
> 
> In the meantime, I will be trying this one for awhile.  I have had to
> respond to a handful of such "response required" from a handful of people I
> have emailed, and I did so, no biggie.  I can see that some think it is a
> poor idea but such is life.