Interesting fact of the day. 86% of my mail for the month of May was spam. I've had the same email address for about 7 years. And I've made almost no effort to prevent it from appearing on public webpages, newsgroups and message boards, so I'm a bit of a spam magnet. But thanks to my elaborate home-cooked filtering system (consisting of fetchmail, procmail, and perl), only a couple dozen of these spams landed in my inbox.
Now aren't you glad you checked in to my website?
I'm a bit obsessed with spam. Back in '96, spam wasn't a huge deal, so I'd just delete the crap. Then by around '98 it became so annoying that I started to work with various mail filters. Now spam is a bit of a hobby of mine. I enjoy figuring out ways to improve my filters to reduce spam. I'd say the biggest problem is domains like msn.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com, etc... which account for a majority of the spam generated right now (at least those are the domains that appear on the From line of most spam). Yet there's a small amount of legitimate email generated from these domains, so I can't completely filter them out.
So I use white, black and gray lists along with common spam strings to do most of my filtering. I used to use procmail exclusively, but I quickly found it tedious to add new entries to my black and white lists, so I wrote a simple perl script that generates these lists on the fly each and every time an email comes it. It sure seems like a lot of work, but I'm not the one having to generate those lists, so who cares?
OK, end of worthless rant.
If you're interested in spam like I am, leave a comment here or send me an email. If it doesn't get filtered out into my spam folder, I may respond to it.
Another interesting fact, if your email contains the string "Harry Slaughter - [email protected]", which is part of my sig line, it will go straight to my Inbox.