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07/06/2004 Entry: "Sick of junk mail ... ?"
Despite all the doom and gloom about spam, there are some effective ways of dealing with it. I have an email address widely known on the internet since I have been using it for years, long before I cared about spam. Of course, I am smarter now, but I used to get lots of spam. Now I get almost none.
The first blow against spam was when I moved to challenge and response provider. These work well. Email from a new sender (eg a spam mail, but also a friend with a new email account) will not automatically arrive at your inbox. You either review such unverified mail (if you are expecting such an email) or the sender answers the challenge sent by the system. This works because spammers never answer such a challenge; they have non-existent email addresses to being with.
Filtering, the automatic way of dealing with spam, is now so good that it copes with the problem. I have a Yahoo account (at the moment, with a free 100MB of space) that has brilliant filters, some spam gets through but one or two messages a day I can live with.
I use AlienCamel.com for my main private account. This is a paid service, with 1 GB of space, a fast web frontend and pop/imap support. And I can forward to it so there is no need to change my well established address.
Meanwhile, I have taken my email address off my website: contact to me now goes via a form. If you have your own website, you will know what I mean.
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Mozilla, a super browser, has since release 1.3 implemented some very smart email filters in the mail client. These use statistical techniques which you train: all you do is click on mail that is junk, or correct mail it incorrectly flags as junk. This seems to work quite well for my wife's account. Mozilla's email software is being moved into a standalone program called Thunderbird. Of course, by not using Outlook and IE we have been spared quite some potential misery.
Mozilla is an open-source Web browser and email client. I use it all the time, on Windows and Linux. There are tremendous advantages to using Mozilla: it is much more secure, and much more fun. No more pop-up ads, and with about two minutes work, you can block flash ads quite well also. You will eliminate many virus risks once you stop using Outlook, and once you learn about the powerful features of Mozilla, you will be happy. It comes with tabbed browsing and other really nice features. And it's open source: you are making the internet a more open place by using it, which I think is the same as making the internet a better place.
I can see Mozilla slowly increasing its share in my weblogs, which is nice.
You can learn more at http://www.mozilla.org or http://www.mozillazine.org