Our local ISP has a great spam filter. They use Postini. It's not friendly from an end-user standpoint...so I can't even bother recommending it to my readers. Except to say, if you use a little ISP, email them and ask them if you can have Postini. It's only available to Internet Service Providers.
I paid $1.95 per month at first to have it filter all my email. After about 6 months they made it available for free to all their customers.
That filter catches all but about 2 junk emails every day. That averages about 50 emails that I would have had to delete myself each day.50 times I would be working and see the little envelope pop up, go there to see who it is and find out it's another piece of junk.
But a little over a week ago, the thing stopped working.
It was about the time the big worms were starting up, so I thought "well, maybe Postini's having a problem. I'll deal with it a few days and see if it gets better". It didn't. Got worse in fact.
It turns out that somehow, someone had added my email address as a mailto: address that Postini should ignore and not filter out. Essentially, someone programmed it to say "if mail comes in addressed to kpaulson@cleveco.com send it through...don't filter it. So it was only filtering the 5 emails a day I get that are sent to "info" or "webmaster" or "friend" or whatever.
It took 4 calls to tech support before someone finally figured it out. But, persistence paid off, and I'm back in spam-less heaven. And finally I stopped getting emails from big company servers telling me I sent them a virus. (See Aug 19's entry)
It's going to be a nice weekend. Spam-wise anyway. I think it's going to rain. Again.
8:10:01 AM 
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