Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Junk

336 words

Does anyone else have the impression that the amount of spam or other 'unsolicited' junk they receive has increased in the past weeks? 52 of them have been filtered out by Mail's junk filter today alone. That's up from something like 35 for one to two days when I used pine while on holiday and the 10 to 15 per day I used to have.

Dave Winer also writes about spam today and offers the idea of filtering all mails from friends to a separate mailbox. I have found that that kind of filtering may be a bit of a pain as it requires you keep your filter up to date. Plus, there is a much neater method to deal with this, seeing that many e-mail programs (well, at least Apple's Mail and PowerMail do) have a 'sender is in address book' condition for their filters.

This let's you easily have a low-maintenance way of implementing the filter Dave has, but it also lets you do fancier things, like having really restrictive filters for identifying spam (say filter for $ in the subject line or HTML contents) and couple it with a 'is not in my address book' condition. In fact, any filter that redirects a message to the trash should have that condition in it. This way your friends can write whatever they want and you spam filter will never kill their messages.

And in case spammers become much cleverer than they are now, i.e. if they manage to bypass Mail's junk filter more than once a day or so, you can still switch your filtering to only display messages with senders in your address book in your inbox and put everything else in a different folder that you'll only have to check rarely for messages by random people that you may receive.

Now listen to this, now listen to this
if you eat junk, you become junk
I never broke no law no, I saved a nation.

Six By Seven, Eat Junk, Become Junk

April 3, 2003, 23:17

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