I have VICTORY!
Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2003 7:42 am
Yes! Victory at last over SPAM!
Last week for some reason the amount of spam being sent to my E-mail address I use for my comic had reached the breaking point.
Where as usually I get only 50-100 spam a day I was getting over 500 spam a day. The filters on my E-mail account simply could not keep up with all the creative way spammers tried to defeat them.
Then it occured to me. What if, instead of trying to scan my e-mail for spam and delete it, I scanned my e-mail for messages I wanted and deleted everything else.
So I have a password now which must be included in the subject header of any email sent to me. It must say "TENTACLE" somewhere in the subject header or the e-mail will be automatically deleted unread. I posted notices on my page in the news section, the FAQ and the forums that all e-mail sent to me must have this password or go unread. I was already sure I was probably missing out on plenty of legitimate e-mails using the old method as I would just dump the entire inbox rather than trying in vain to search through the mountain of spam for the real letters.
The experiment has so far proven to be a huge success. This morning there were a dozen legitimate e-mails in my inbox, all with the word "tentacle" in the subject header, and there was not a single spam to be seen. My spam filter, instead of being a huge bloated dictionary of things to seek and destroy is a simple one line if[SUBJECT]does not contain[TENTACLE]then[TRASH].
All spam gets trashed and anyone who doesn't pay enough attention to my site to read the notice on how to e-mail me gets their messages trashed too which, all things considered, is probably just as well.
No more searching for real messages. No more bulky spam filters. No more spam. I'm surprised I didn't think of this before.
Last week for some reason the amount of spam being sent to my E-mail address I use for my comic had reached the breaking point.
Where as usually I get only 50-100 spam a day I was getting over 500 spam a day. The filters on my E-mail account simply could not keep up with all the creative way spammers tried to defeat them.
Then it occured to me. What if, instead of trying to scan my e-mail for spam and delete it, I scanned my e-mail for messages I wanted and deleted everything else.
So I have a password now which must be included in the subject header of any email sent to me. It must say "TENTACLE" somewhere in the subject header or the e-mail will be automatically deleted unread. I posted notices on my page in the news section, the FAQ and the forums that all e-mail sent to me must have this password or go unread. I was already sure I was probably missing out on plenty of legitimate e-mails using the old method as I would just dump the entire inbox rather than trying in vain to search through the mountain of spam for the real letters.
The experiment has so far proven to be a huge success. This morning there were a dozen legitimate e-mails in my inbox, all with the word "tentacle" in the subject header, and there was not a single spam to be seen. My spam filter, instead of being a huge bloated dictionary of things to seek and destroy is a simple one line if[SUBJECT]does not contain[TENTACLE]then[TRASH].
All spam gets trashed and anyone who doesn't pay enough attention to my site to read the notice on how to e-mail me gets their messages trashed too which, all things considered, is probably just as well.
No more searching for real messages. No more bulky spam filters. No more spam. I'm surprised I didn't think of this before.
