Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve been looking for something to fight for quite a while. I sign up a lot of places online and give out my email address, so I get a ton. I am talking hundreds of messages per day! I am not too hopeful about the national anti-spam legislation that mimics the recent do-not-call list. Even if it does go into law, spammers will just go overseas. Unless there is some international treaties on the stuff, I’m not sure much is going to change. I use Outlook for email and have been looking for something that not only filters spam but also lets you report it and/or bounce it.

Looking on the very helpful site spam.abuse.net, I found the name of an application that looked like it would fit my requirements. Giant Company Software makes Spam Inspector, a program that is kind of a plug-in in your Outlook inbox (actually, though, Spam Inspector is supposed to work within Eudora and even with Hotmail accounts – as well as something I’m unfamiliar with called Incredimail). It will filter suspected spam into a separate directory. You can tag messages as either spam or not spam (it learns this way and after using it for a week or so, it’s about 99.9% accurate – the only missteps I’ve seen have been just mass mail notes from various sites I’ve signed up with). You can bounce messages back to the sender in an effort to make it look like your address is invalid. This probably has no affect most of the time, but maybe in a few cases it might get you off a list? And you can report spam. It analyzes the headers of your message and generates a standard email to get sent to spam.abuse.net as well as any isp who’s address is referenced in the headers. A lot of times spammers spoof such addresses, so it doesn’t matter, but can’t I be hopeful that at least by reporting some spammers are getting kicked off of their ISP faster than they would have otherwise?

Maybe it is a losing battle, but this is a heck of a lot better than having to look at the subject and sender of each message to try to figure out if I should just delete it or actually take a chance and open it!