It may shock you, but I do nothing out of the ordinary on my PC to hold back the spam tide. Nothing. Well, nothing outside of the normal features used by my e-mail program.
Yes, indeed, I still get spam, but hardly as much as I got years ago. I remember out of 13 messages in my inbox, maybe one was legitimate. That was even after my own efforts at filtering and deleting messages I knew were spam.
Right now I just checked, and so far today I’ve received 21 e-mails and not one of them was spam. That’s pretty good!
Every so often, spam reminds me that it’s out there: The occasional pharmaceutical ad comes in. (Why for the life of me anyone would be prescription drugs from someone who can’t even spell Viagra is beyond me!) I still get porn spam, though my e-mail program proudly suppresses the pictures. There are also those mystery spam messages that I just can’t quite make out: gibberish that looks like English that isn’t. (I’m not referring to the Russian spam I get, which is plentiful, but at least it’s Russian and not random words that look like English.)
What am I doing differently today? Nothing. I believe all the spam is being filtered by my ISP. I believe that the so-called “black hole” lists are working. The millions, upon millions of spam messages sent every day are just not making it to our inboxes like they once did.
No, I’m not creating Message Rules. I have only one Message Rule, in fact: There is this “family” web site that send me e-mail but requires that I log in to unsubscribe. I refuses to send me my long-forgotten password, so I believe it’s s scam. (Legitimate e-mail lists let you unsubscribe simply by supplying your e-mail address, not by logging in.) So I created a Message Rule that instantly deletes all those messages. But beyond that, I’m living a rather spam-free e-mail life these days.
How about you?
I have about five email accounts going into Outlook 2007. I have TMIS installed, and that catches out most of the spam. If not, I just click it and hit the “Spam” button on the toolbar it provides. Most of the spam goes to my Yahoo!7 Inbox, and I’ve disabled my ISP’s spam filter, as it would direct spam to another mailbox, and I’m just apathetic in that way.
Comment by Douglas — July 2, 2008 @ 4:19 am
I once used the “Junk” filter in my e-mail program, but I soon discovered that it was eating real e-mail as much as it was eating spam, so I turned it off. Even now, some mail gets flagged as “junk” that is legitimate. I suppose the low volume makes it tolerable.
Comment by admin — July 2, 2008 @ 7:45 am