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Open thread: Favorite spam blocker service?

Submitted by Merlin on May 21, 2006 - 7:36am.

I’ve been relatively fortunate with filtering spam over the past couple years (knock on wood). But despite a kickass three-tiered system that includes the world-beating server-side Sieve, plus Mail.app’s pretty good client filtering, it’s inevitable that even my best-loved private email addresses would find their way into the wrong hands (it’s why I recently created “ThanksNo.com” – an experiment in social re-engineering that you are free to use as well).

So, now that the spelling-impaired Lords of The Dark Side have such renewed interest in my investment options and genital proportions, I’m considering joining a service like Spam Arrest or the apparently deceased Knowspam. I mostly plan to run this on the addresses I use for strictly personal stuff, so I’m satisfied I can start with a “whitelist” to ensure I don’t generate loops or dead ends for the “good” senders. But, you tell me…

Apart from running smart filters on your server and in your mail client, what’s the best way to protect a mydomain.com-type email address from becoming compromised and punked-out? What are the dangers and cons of using a challenge/response service like Spam Arrest? Apart from abandoning it wholesale, what’s the most effective and non-annoying way to rehabilitate a compromised address?

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I tend to disagree with...

Submitted by Alexandra (not verified) on May 21, 2006 - 1:00pm.

I tend to disagree with the use of challenge-response systems, because they essentially double the resource consumption (particularly bandwidth and CPU cycles) of all mail going through the account - spam included. Also, as Nessa mentioned it will mark your address as “active” (even though you might never see the spam because it’s been blocked, the spambots don’t know that and will send more and more once they know it’s a valid address)… resource consumption just keeps increasing.

I personally go for Bayesian filtering, like many above. Greylisting also looks very interesting (I’ll definitely take a closer look at that).