Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Thursday, April 29, 2004

A funny thing happened on the way to my inbox 

A couple of people from one discussion list I am on, myself included, were opining the other day that given the maintenance headaches of some anti-spamware, it's just easier to eyeball and delete. I had so many start-up problems with the last program I tried (the name of which escapes me at this second) I uninstalled it after a few days.

Your average user shouldn't be asked to spell bayesian filter let alone tune one.

Before I went out this morning, I looked at my e-mail and wondered why one of my editors hadn't replied to a message yet. When I came back a few minutes ago I looked in the Spam folder and there he was, the spammer. ;>

Glutton for punishment that I am, and as part of my efforts as a volunteer web site content provider for CAUCE Canada: (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), I am trying out some new spam freeware called spamfighter that has a collaborative element to it.

The SPAMfighter web site explains: "SPAMfighter works completely differently by using the power of more than 370.000 people in 149 countries that instantly report if they receive a spam mail. When several people have reported the same spam mail, it's automatically filtered for the rest of the community. This way very few people in the community will ever see the spam mail. On top of that a lot of spam is filtered before it even hits the community, but how we do that we will keep for ourselves. The spammers are reading our site as well."

I installed it yesterday. So far, so good. The program has accurately caught several spam and the only misplaced message, besides a couple of newsletters that give all anti-spamware fits, was the one from my editor.

The first entry in the FAQ strongly advises watching the Spam folder carefully for the first month and luckily I took the advice to heart.

If, as in the case of my editor's message, the software erroneously marks the message as spam, the unblock button, which is automatically added to the Outlook and/or Outlook Express toolbars during installation, moves it back to the Inbox and whitelists the address.

If you're not connected to the Internet when you fire up the mail client Spamfighter tells you it's noticed but that's it. Otherwise it silently connects to its server.

There are commercial and server versions as well.

If you try it let me know what you think at pboake@gmail.com

Yes, that is a Google mail address.