Email Cleaning

Saturday, October 23, 2004 at 10:21 pm | Comments off

I did a bit of "email cleaning" across several of my domains today. I previously had catch-all email addresses set up, which it turns out, wasn't the best idea. Sure, in theory, they're great. You get all email sent to your domain, so even if someone makes a typo, it's all good (excluding the domain name, of course). However, there's a big problem with this. It's called spam.

I wish I would have kept exact numbers, but I probably deleted upwards of 10,000 spam or otherwise unwanted emails. Some of the email were output from my crontab, which was more or less an oversite on my part, but for the most part, they were spam email. Off the domain I run for my sister, we deleted over 31 MB of unwanted email. Yikes!

Comments

Jona
October 25th, 2004
2:22 AM | #

Eww... Spam sucks. Will it ever go away?

Jordon Brill
October 25th, 2004
3:15 AM | #

31 Megs of SPAM? Ouch... I just recently did that on a few of my domains too. Just sick...

Neczy
October 25th, 2004
5:27 PM | #

Yeah man, that really stinks. I don't mean to get offtopic, but your site is a little messed up in IE 5.2 for Mac. The navigation is below the content area. I can check Safari later this afternoon...

Nathan Logan
October 25th, 2004
6:20 PM | #

Hey Ryan,

I just thought I would let you in on a little secret... It's called MailWasher. It's on the client side (not the server side), but it has worked wonders for me. It uses Bayesian filtering and national spam lists and works like a charm.

You can preview it for some amount of time (a month?), at which time you will either get a dummed-down version that allows you to bounce unwanted e-mail back to the sender, but doesn't have the neat options (no bayesian filtering, national spam lists, etc.). Registration is like $20, either annually or one-time.

Anyway, take a look. It's a great little program.

Ryan Brill
October 25th, 2004
6:26 PM | #

Actually, all this spam was simply due to my having catch-all email addresses set up on my domains. I now set them to bounce any email that does not come to a specific domain.

I've been using SpamAssasin for a while now, and it's been working great. Still no false positives, so I'm starting to have quite a bit of faith in it.

Nathan Logan
October 25th, 2004
8:18 PM | #

Right, I was just saying that you can still have a catch-all (and all the benefits that includes, especially with your business site) and still catch the spam.

Comments are automatically closed after 45 days