Yesterday was a terrible day in terms of spam and viruses. Indeed, a new virus has been released on the internet (you can read about it here). This bastard has really been clogging my inbox. Yesterday, I received 327 spam/virus emails. I usually only get about 50-60 per day.

Have you been getting more email lately? If you receive more than I do, what spam filtering solution do you use? I’ve installed POPFile at home and it does a decent job. However, I haven’t been using it long enough to train it properly and now it’s been churning out too many false positives for my liking. In addition, various email addresses @shade.ca have been spoofed by the new virus so I’ve been getting literally hundreds of bounced back messages (because I receive anything that is sent to @shade.ca that hasn’t been associated to anyone else). Therefore, I’ve trained it to kill those too but now I’ll never know if my messages get bounced back.

At work, I’ve got Microsoft Outlook 2003 and, before this new wave started, it worked pretty well. I haven’t taken a look at how it works but I didn’t have to train it. Obviously, MS took time to classify spam for us. However, I haven’t seen anything that would enable me to classify a certain email as spam for future reference. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough (probably) but lately, their spam filter has been letting through my favorite new email "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment".

In any case, what do you use? What has worked best? I’m most interested in hearing from people who get lots of spam/viruses which are, I imagine, mostly webmasters but if you just happen to receive lots of mail (which you didn’t sign up for ), write me a message. Just make sure you don’t leave the body/title blank because my spam filter will eat you up :).

Email me using the link millions of spammers will use :)

Updated 02/02/04: I received over 2800 spam/virus emails in the last 7 days. Not too bad: 2800 emails/week * 20k/email * 3 billion me's = why the internet is slow