I started composing this as a Pit thread, but the farther I got the more I realized I have a legitimate question, so I’ve redone it as a GQ.
I have been a proponent of (and lover of) email since before most people had ever heard of it. I got my company up and running on email in 1981, and it was a huge productivity boost, especially for engineers that worked funny hours.
Today, I’ve grown to detest it. I tell people please not to email me if they can help it. I dread sitting down to go through my email. Why? In a word: spam.
I’ve had to give up the email address I have used for ten years (firstname@lastname.org) because I was getting over 400 spams per day. I replaced it with something less intuitive, and that one is now getting over 250 spams per day. My work email addresses get even more than that. I’ve built dozens of spam-filtering rules and implemented various autofiltering and learning-based filters, but they eliminate so many legitimate emails that I end up having to read through the whole damned spam folder anyway, and since I dread doing it, I put it off for a month and there are thousands of emails in it.
I’m a freelance writer and I own a bookstore and a small newspaper. Virtually any subject could be a legitimate email. I’ve cut things down a bit by killing any email with words like fuck, viagra, slut, or cialis in the subject line, but since they spell it /i…@G…rrra (or something similar) most of them get through anyway.
A single missed email could cost me thousands of dollars if it’s a book proposal or a large order. The automated system I got when I switched hosts last time trashed almost half of my legitimate emails.
Help me. Please help me.
How can I go back to the days when I actually enjoyed checking my email?
There was a thread on this awhile ago.
My personal opinion is that email is fundamentally broken, and no amount of spam filtering is going to fix it. We’re just going to have to wait until a more robust system arises out of the ashes of the current one.
You changed e-mail addresses once, you can do it again. Get a Gmail.com account and let them worry about spam filtering. I see maybe 2 spams a week there.
If you want to do it yourself and run your own mail server, I would suggest looking into a Greywall. Also POPFile works very well at classifying e-mail as spam or good, but even if it’s 99% accurate that can still mean 1 good message out of 100 is put in the spam bucket.
I forward my domain mail to gmail and let them do the filtering for me, it works quite well, I think I’ve seen maybe 2 spam messages slip through a month. My actual domain mailbox fills up quite quickly with spam but I just set it to empty automatically after a certain number of messages and then otherwise ignore it.
This is from a guy who does speaking tours specifically on dealing with E-mail. I haven’t attended them myself, but they come highly recommended, and there appear to be some good links and resources listed.
What exactly are you doing to get your email address out there? Do you post it directly on your Web site? Do you put it all over the Web? Do you collect mail for anything@yourdomain.com? Is your address something like “info@” or “service@”?
You may need to rethink your email publishing strategy. If your address is “out there” it is “out THERE” and an open invitation for spam. You should look in to both changing your address and then taking steps to keep it private.
Use forms with captchas on your site for correspondence instead of “click here to email me” or “email me at info@mydomain.com.” If you must publish your address, consider “obscuring” it as “email me at info at mydomain.com.” If you use message boards or guest books or any sort of listing to publicize your business, don’t submit an email address - if you want correspondence give a link to your contact form instead. Don’t set up a catchall account for your domain. Don’t use your business email for anything but your business.
Another thing to do, to deal with the spam you’re inevitably going to get, is use a spam system that sends you a daily report of emails that got sent to your spam folder (and never use a service that auto-deletes email before giving you a chance to review it.) It only takes 10 seconds a day to read over a spam report. Then work on tweaking spam rules and whitelists so you have less spam to deal with and spend less time retrieving false positives.
I use pobox.com as an email redirection service. Not only do they provide an excellent spam-filtering service, but I can create and delete aliases as needed to interact with untrusted entities. It’s not a free service, but the price is low, and I’ve found it to be well worth it.
[QUOTE=ZipperJJUse forms with captchas on your site for correspondence instead of “click here to email me” or “email me at info@mydomain.com.” If you must publish your address, consider “obscuring” it as “email me at info at mydomain.com.” If you use message boards or guest books or any sort of listing to publicize your business, don’t submit an email address - if you want correspondence give a link to your contact form instead.[/QUOTE]
But all of these put extra work and barriers in the way of the customers who are trying to reach you. Not the people you want to annoy!
If I have to read the email address and then type it into my program at your online store, while at your competitors I just have to click on the link, I’m going to tend to buy from him, just because it’s easier.
I get about one false positive in Gmail every two months. Otherwise it’s got fantastic filtering. I think Google do a relatively cheap “let us host your mail” thing, so you can use the interface, filters, and other features of Gmail, but retain your domain.
As a general reply to the “just change your email again” folks, I’m a writer and I own two businesses. My email address has been printed in 150,000 books and handed out on thousands of business cards. I can’t just change it every few months.
On my Web site, I created an image with my email address arranged along a wavy line in a gradient color pattern on a gradient color background. People can read it, but I’m 99% sure that email-harvesting software can’t. I don’t use catchall. My email address is my first name (which is a fairly common name) and the domain is my last name. I used to use “admin@” addresses on my domains, but I had to kill them because the lowlife scumsucking bastards that send the spam start hitting “admin@” within days (or in one case, hours) of a new domain going live.
It has to be out there. It’s my living. I must be able to get emails from people I don’t know that have picked up one of my books and want to pay me for a speaking engagement. I must be able to get emails from bookstore customers, potential consulting clients, and so forth.
I’ve set up a gmail account that only my family, a few friends, and my publishers know about. It works fine. But if I switched my business email to gmail I’d lose the filters, autoresponders, shopping-cart interface, and carefully-tweaked mail-handling scripts I’ve developed over the years. And using gmail as a business address makes your company look tiny and behind the times.
I don’t have time to check your links right away, ArchiveGuy, but I’ll read them and respond to you later today. Thanks.
I get more than 40,000 spam mails per month (due to having put up a number of hobbyist web sites and forwarding the contact address for these, also my firstname@lastname.net e-mail address is almost 10 years old now).
It’s manageable with Gmail (where all my addresses are forwarded to); I just need to delete about 20 spam mails per day.
I use Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/) It’s actually really good about marking spam as spam, and it’s easy to whitelist friends. I don’t get nearly as much email as you do, but I have found that if I check it often it’s less daunting.
Do the legitimate emails you get sometimes contain information you wouldn’t want an employee to see? If not, perhaps you could get a high school girl (or stay at home mom looking for supplemental income) to come in for an hour or so a day and weed out the spam for you. At minimum wage you’d only be out six dollars or so per day (or every other day or however often it would take) and my guess is that your time is worth considerably more than that. And in a practical sense it wouldn’t be much different from having a secretary open your mail for you…something that has heretofore been done for decades.
I know this isn’t exactly the kind of help you’re looking for, but if I were you this is the type of solution I’d be looking at.
I also need to receive messages from strangers who may be potential clients, so I have a lot of the limitations of the OP and others in this thread. My Web host has a pretty good spam filter setup – 100% user-controlled, as opposed to my old host, where they used their own blacklists which resulted in me losing a lot of legitimate mail. At least now I do have the option of skimming my spam folder for false positives. Between my Web host’s filter and Eudora’s junk filter, I get about 20 spams a day in Eudora, and most of those go into Eudora’s Junk folder; the other 80 or so stay on the server until I delete them.
I do still have to skim the server-side spam folder, but if I do it once a day, as I try to, it takes only about a minute. I also sort the spams by subject, so all the duplicates are together and it’s faster to skim past them.
Another option is to sign up with Postini. That’s where Google gets their spam filter (they bought Postini a few months ago).
You can set it so e-mail to your address automatically goes through their filters. You can also whitelist and blacklist as well as release messages that were blocked by mistake. There’s a daily e-mail of quarantined messages to check, but judging by the numbers, there’s plenty of spam that gets dropped without even going to quarantine.
Taking a look, it appears the price is not unreasonable: minimum filtering at $3/user/year, and more robust filtering at $12 and $25. The $3 may be good enough, too.
The more I think about it, the better fit it looks to be.
This was my thought to. In fact, I’d look into software that would allow such an trusted employee to look at your e-mail, and delete spam, from her own PC.
At my job, we have such an applcation for workers who want to do work from home. They log in with a password, and you could change that password if that particular emloyee no longer worked for you.
In fact, maybe that kind of work could be done from one of those websites that allow you to check your email when you are away from home? I’m not talking about hotmail or G-mail, but a site where you can fill in some info from your existing e-mail adress and check your e-mail from there.
Granted, it could be mind-numbing as an all day job but the OP appears to need access to important messages quickly, which means that his/her email likely needs to be checked at least every few days if not daily, so I don’t think the job would be all that difficult given the relatively small amount of time it would take to stay on top of it. (Besides, like I said, secretaries have been performing this function effectively for decades - and there are no envelopes to contend with ).
Regarding false-positives, I’m not all that well versed in higher-level spam filters but I would imagine that human beings would be more effective at this type of decision-making than email programs. Also, humans can be more easily instructed, and adjustments, if necessary, can be made quickly and easily by just telling the employee what adjustments need to be made.
I also had in mind that the OP would most likely retain access to the deleted spam for a quick once-over now and then just to make sure something important hadn’t slipped through.
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