Readers of mssv.net will remember my ill-fated expedition into Mozilla Mail 1.3. There was only one reason behind the expedition – to get rid of the 50+ junk mails that I receive per day.
In itself, the junk mail is not that much of an annoyance compared to other things in life. However, it is something that should be easily fixed and given that there are things like Bayesian analysis and Spam Assassin out there, I was always irritated not only by having to delete the spam, but also about the fact that I couldn’t use these spam killing mechanisms.
Today, while checking up on some websites I run, I was delighted to find out that Pair.com have finally implemented Spam Assassin on their mail servers. I immediately enabled it on newmars.com and it has been pretty good at filtering the junk away. Not perfect, but better than nothing.
However, being the sort of person that I am, I have three active email addresses that all run on different servers. One of them, the university mail server, uses IMAP and has no provision for spam detection (I did read that they intend to install Spam Assassin in the near future though). The other one, vavatch.co.uk, does not have Spam Assassin and I don’t see it being installed anytime soon.
Feeling in a bit of a combative mood, I went and downloaded SA Proxy. SA Proxy basically intercepts your POP mail before it reaches your local email client and runs Spam Assassin on it. Best of all, it runs on Windows. SA Proxy always struck me as being an inelegant solution, but I decided desperate times called for desperate measures.
Setting up SA Proxy was relatively straightforward although I am certain they could make the instructions clearer (alternatively, I could just read them slower). Time will tell whether running SA Proxy will make me feel happier; I suspect that it will need some tweaking before it performs optimally. I may also shift newmars.com over to SA Proxy (turning the server-run SA off, obviously) for greater flexibility.
However, even if I still get a few pieces of spam coming in every day – and it’s certain that I will do, since my uni address is completely unfiltered – at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I am doing something about it.
mssv 