engine - 8:14 pm on Nov 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Back a year or so ago I was getting very frustrated about the spam coming in. Far too much time was being spent manually filtering.

Now, I automate it as much as possible with, at least, four forms of defence. OA Bayesian filter and a banned IP check on the mailserver, at the point of polling I use a blacklist/whitelist filter, with a automatic check against reported spam, then, on the mail client there are further filters, and finally, it's me.

Some stuff still gets through, but then, it's way down on what it used to be. I do let some slip through so I can keep updating my filters. I view this like i'm getting a flu jab to help combat the latest strain going round.

"Leo wrote:" or "Name wrote:",

Those are easy to catch, although there's been a lot recently. It's relatively easy to set up filters on those that are consistent.

I have a fairly comprehensive whitelist, and keep a live blacklist going. Sometimes, certain domains are used all the time, and they simply get added to the blacklist.

The biggest problem with so much filtering is that some good stuff may be getting swallowed up. There's not much I can do about that.