God, spammers. Aren’t they annoying? Whether it’s filling your inbox with messages about your willy or clogging up this fine site with ads for Phentermine – whatever that is – they definitely want shooting.
I haven’t personally had much spam in a long time – this isn’t a hint – mostly because I avoid posting my email address anywhere and I make sure I sign up for sites using a Hotmail address I don’t ever have to look at. I think that’s the most effective way of keeping email spammers at bay, but there are a few more.
SpamAssassin is super if you can be bothered to get it running; it’s written in Perl and only really works on Unix systems. It’s great though – it assigns scores to various spam-like attributes, and if a message scores above a certain threshold, it’s thrown out. Very clever. The Thunderbird email client lets you mark messages as “spam” or “not spam”, and learns from experience. That’s pretty clever too.
