Computers: August 2004 Archives

The EECS department at Case (where my e-mail is hosted) has recently added DSPAM to their mail servers, instead of SpamAssassin. The switch has been a little annoying -- it has forced me to figure out how to move messages between different IMAP folders in pine, which while I have figured out, is still too many keystrokes. The reason why messages have to be shifted around is because DSPAM is a learning system, similar to Mail.app's Junk system.

And of course, because DSPAM needs to be trained, it has really sucked at finding SPAM for the last couple of days. I think that it might be getting a bit better, but it is hard to say. I think what might be hurting it is that when I do use Apple's Mail.app, it plucks the SPAM out into its own folder, and thus as a result, DSPAM doesn't get trained. I'm going to have to research how to make these two kids play better together.

-Andy.

When I was out at OSCON two weeks ago, I performed a little experiment. Since I knew that I was going to be using only one computer, my PowerBook, for the entire week, I decided that I would not delete any SPAM. Instead, I would let it all pile up in the "Junk" folder in Mail.app. I have been curious for awhile as to how much SPAM I'm actually getting, but it has been hard for me to track, because I am pretty fanatical about deleting it.

So, from Sunday the 23rd of July through Sunday August 1st, I didn't delete a single SPAM. And the total that I reached? A mere two hundred and seventy-seven messages. On the one hand, that is a lot of e-mail. It occurs to me as I write this that I should also have tracked the total number of e-mails that I received in that week, so as to determine the ratio of signal to noise in my inbox. But, one conclusion that I can reach is that I'm probably getting less SPAM then many other people out there on the 'net.

Oh, and the other conclusion is that SPAM sucks. But everybody knew that already, right?

-Andy.