seanbonner: Spam and whitelisting

February 22, 2005

Spam and whitelisting When I first got a treo180 back in '02 (and yes I used to post to my greymatter blog with it) my biggest problem was using it for e-mail because of all the spam I got. I considered all kinds of things and finally went with a server side batch of filters that caught as much real mail as spam. It kind of did the trick but not really. When I moved away from the treo in favor of something with bluetooth I stopped checking e-mail on the device and started using my laptop and thus mail.app's built in spam filters. Now that I'm getting a treo again I'm remember the hell of downloading 50 new messages to find all of them are spam - and the bandwidth bills that went with that. So I'm considering new options. The first if a whitelist of some sort. Something that only lets in specific people. More on that from A Whole Lotta Nothing:

"About 14 months ago I started using Knowspam for email whitelisting, and I remember more than one person basically said 'wow, email must be broken.'

While whitelisting is a bit of a pain on random strangers that email me, it does mean that I get almost no spam in the 50-60 emails I get every day. I noticed tonight that I'm getting closer to a million spams blocked since I started, at 844,904 to be exact. Divided by 14 months, that's just a hair over 2,000 spams blocked per day."

So that's an attractive option but it comes with a cost and yes, whitelists are annoying. The other option I'm considering is setting up a new e-mail to use on the treo and not giving it out anywhere - just using it to send and thereby never checking e-mail from the phone. I don't know if I can actually pull that off and yes, it's a stop gap since that will start getting spam soon too. on my laptop mail.app has blocked 597 pieces of spam in the last 24 hours, none of which I ever want to see on my phone. So what do you treo600 & treo650 owners do to make sure you are only downloading e-mail you actually care about?

oh, yeah: Joi just reminded me that email is dead and points to shinkuro as another option. I'm trying it out - seanbonner!shinkuro.com

Posted by sean on February 22, 2005 11:09 PM | View blog reactions
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Comments

i don't have a solution. but, when you come up with one share it with me. i was downloading TONS of junk on my 650 in vegas.

at least my $19.95 all-u-can-eat data plan saves me the cost of downloading spam. time, i have.

Posted by: michael on February 23, 2005 06:52 AM

I (co-)run my own mail server, so I may have options you don't, but when we installed SpamAssassin 3.0.2 in combo with Razor (and a little light whitelisting the first week or so), my spam went down to 2 or 3 a day. I'm catching around 10,000 spams a day, so I can live with a false negative or two (I don't want to have to go into that caughtspam folder if I can help it).

Posted by: Fuzzy on February 23, 2005 08:29 AM

good article.

Posted by: mike bertelsen on February 23, 2005 05:44 PM

I probably don't have the spam issues that you do, but here is my set up. I just use gmail. There spam filters are pretty decent and I have all my mail forwarded to that account. Gmail filters the spam. Then I use the POP setup in mail.app. I haven't had one spam mail get through in 2 or 3 months. I am planning on trying this when I get my 650 in a couple of days.

Do you think it will work?

Posted by: jp on February 24, 2005 09:49 PM