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SPAM

As I mentioned to John, my McAfee SpamKiller has gotten decidedly less effective over the past couple of weeks. So I went looking today and downloaded Spam Sleuth by Blue Squirrel Software.

I’ve technically still got 60 days before I have to decide whether it’s worth keeping, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling so far.

Like SpamKiller, it checks in with your server intermittently and pulls off the spam, leaving only the good stuff for your mail client to show you. You can always go into the Spam Sleuth client to see how it’s doing and make adjustments.

But it’s one of those programs that doesn’t make much effort to hide its greasy innards from you. Each message it scans gets a point score based on an impressive array of Spam-finding logic. You can specify how many points any given criterion is worth, then decide how many points a message must accumulate before it gets deleted.

They seem to have looked at every known approach to Spam filtering and thrown it in. There are keyword and profanity filters, whitelists, blacklists, filters that look at how much html the message has, what kind of attachments are attached, and filters you can customize for any header field. Then there’s a Bayesian filter you train based on your evaluation of the filters, as well as a handshakey “turing test” that requires new senders to translate a graphic to test before allowing them on your whitelist. There’s also an “e-mail stamp” feature that would require a sender to put money into your paypal account before delivering their message to you. (That one’s based on a good theory, but I don’t see myself using it.) All of these are customizeable and can be selectively turned off or on.

All in all, it seems like a pretty powerful package, although it’s a little shaky. Mine seems to crash if I try to import my address book into the whitelist. Fortunately you can also give it any mass of text (a text export of my address book) and it’ll pull out the e-mails for you.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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