Since the early 90′s, I have always published my email address in my articles, talks and other public places. In those days few people had email addresses at all, so that wasn’t really much of an issue if a lot of people knew my address, because it gave me the chance to interact with countless people over the years – people I would not have met otherwise, some of whom went on to become my closest friends

But over the years, the world changed. 40% of all email today is unsolicited mail, and despite my best home-grown filters, I find myself spending a good amount of time every day trying to discover the real messages in the deluge of ads that promise to grow certain parts of my body (I wonder – if that actually works, why don’t these spammers use their own stuff to grow a brain?)

Finally, I gave up, and rolled in the big guns. For the past few days, I have deployed SpamAssassin on our mail server.

The impact has been unbelievable.

In 4 days, SpamAssassin has managed to filter more than 500 spam messages from my mailbox, without tagging a single legitimate message as spam. And this is just for me alone – my collegues should be seeing similar results.

In fact, I am now so confident of SpamAssassin’s ability to filter out spam, that I no longer tell it to save such messages in a special mail folder for later perusal – I now ask it to send anything it thinks is spam to /dev/null. Period.

When I open my mailbox, all I see is legitimate mail – not a single ad.

Well, almost.

Some Indian organisations still manage to slip past the filters, simply because the mails they send are handcrafted – they actually use Outlook Express to send these messages one by one. Amateurs!

In such cases, I simply throw their addresses into a blacklist generator (it adds the sender’s email to a blacklist), and that’s the end of it – that person/organisation will never be able to send me another piece of mail – legitimate or otherwise.

And so I now breathe freely. For the first time in years, I open my mail, actually looking forward to the process. Sure, the volume is a lot less (which can be quite an ego damper , but the signal-to-noise ration is *way* up!

Yay!