Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Evolution Email program

I have the 'catchall' addresses for 4 separate domain names funneling into my email account. That means I receive between 180 and 280 spam messagers PER DAY. This is a pain. I did, at one time, have a self-rolled bayesian filter on my email box. It would sign on for me during the day and whack any messages it thought were spam before I ever even checked my POP account. This worked, but it was a bit cumbersome.
About a 6 months ago I switched to Ubuntu as my primary Linux distro. Evolution in Ubuntu comes with Spamassassin built in. I ditched my own spam filter and started using this functionality. For about a month, it was a disaster. I spent a lot of time laboriously picking through the mountains of email to identify to the filter which messages where spam and which were actually useful to me.
The second through fifth months showed a gradual increase in efficacy. But over the last month I must have hit some kind of threshold. I now get a total of maybe THREE spam messages in my inbox per day now. For about two weeks I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and figured that the filter was marking false positives.
But that was just my paranoia. Spamassasin has had no false positives during this time frame. Just fantastic stuff! I think I would recommend my Windows using friends to switch to Linux just for the chance to use Evolution.

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