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Come on then, spammers. Do your worst.

Two simple changes, which I hope will make a big difference. First, in an attempt to stem the average of 2000 spams I get a day, I’ve put in two lines of protection on my email. Then, so I can unblock the commenting feature on this blog, I have finally got my head around MT-Blacklist and removed all of the blocked IP addresses in my Movable Type installation.

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to comment on here in the last few days and found themselves blocked. Thanks to Sean Corfield for the email that convinced me to take another look, in spite of the fact I’ve tried and failed to install it three times in the past.

The email spam blocking, though, took a lot of lateral thinking. My problem isn’t so much that I get a lot of junk - Apple Mail filters out most of it - it’s actually more to do with the fact that if I go away for more than two days without doanloading it all, my mailbox gets full and rejects all subsequent messages.

No good when you’re on a fortnight’s holiday.

So, I’ve installed SpamFire on my G3, which is rapidly becoming more than just the iTunes server role it was originally intended to fulfil. As well as acting as a network backup for all far less stable the Windows machines it’s filtering out the spam mail then using Eudora to redirect all the good ones to a separate Tesco POP3 account.

It has to be Eudora rather than Apple Mail since Mail can only do forwarding, which means it ends up rewriting the header so it looks like all email is coming from myself.

That means the original incoming account it getting emptied every fifteen minutes so will never get full and bounce new messages. The second account, meanwhile, fills up so slowly that it should never reach its limit, even if it’s not checked for a fortnight, because it’s only receiving filtered mail.

Of course, some bad ones still get through, but when the filtered account is picked up by my iBook, Apple Mail’s built-in spam trapping gets rid of most of them. The net result: in the last 24 hours the number of spam emails I have received has fallen from 2000 to 19. I can live with that.

The blog, meanwhile, will still get some spam comments, but probably not as many, and they’re one-click deletable anyway, so arriving at work to find 700 new postings on the subject of Xanaax shouldn’t be such a headache in the future.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.