Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Spam Software for Mom?
daemondev asks: "As a software engineer and FreeBSD user, I've had no problem setting up and using the early anti-spam solutions like Spam-Assassin, TMDA and PopFile. I'm reasonably happy with where I am today, but it certainly could still be better! On the other hand, these solutions are not at all appropriate for my mom, who now has a huge spam problem (she really doesn't need all of that Viagra). I'm looking for something that works "out of the box" and doesn't require a lot of in depth knowledge about email and text filters, and which ideally doesn't need to be updated and replaced continuously. She uses Outlook 2000 on Windows ME. Has anyone found a good package that they would trust to stop spam but that's easy enough for their mom to use?"
I upgraded to the Bayesian version of SpamAssassin as part of my regular maintenance. I didn't train it at all. It works great. If false positives are such a problem why not lower the bar on what gets into your inbox? I just save all my spam to a Spam folder and check it every once in a while (using IMAP). This works great for me and I can catch the occasional false positive. I've had maybe one or two in the last year and neither of them was particularly important emails. They were short notes that got flagged.
This in combination with the Mozilla mail client's Bayesian filter, which is easy to train, works wonderful. It would be cool to have Mozilla's Bayesian filter share its input with SpamAssassin.
That way you simply administer anti-spam tools for her and yourself in a single step.
This may have the added bonus of a common family domain, and of course it extends to siblings, etc.
Before you do it, be sure you want to take on the responsibility of mail system management for your family. Frankly, since it's your mail too, it's likely less work than remotely administering several installations of client-side anti-spam tools.
> 3) NEVER click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
If you don't unsubscribe, you can't complain when you get mailed. Any legitimate companies that do mailings will never mail you after you unsubscribe. Companies don't want to mail people that don't want to be mailed and will complain. They want to mail people that will buy their products.
It's not "mom-easy" to set up, but once it's up and going, she'll have no problem.
mr.
This is not particularly helpful, unless she happens to sign up for an ISP no one has ever heard of. Most major spammers use alphabet attacks to send to every possible combo of letters and numbers @ [name your popular ISP], so even brand new addresses at AOL will get spam in no time. The online form entries are, I'd suspect, only a very small part of the problem.
Professor Jonathan Ezor
Director, Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology