Slamming spamming, part II

While POPFile works fine for my home account, it’s not usable at the office, since I use Outlook tied to an Exchange server, not POP3. (There is, apparently, a POPFile-related program to tie it into Exchange, but that gets too close into Dabbling With Things Messaging Would Slap Me For Doing for comfort.)

So I’m using iHateSpam, which ties very neatly into Outlook, and, through a combo of white lists, black lists, and keyword/pattern recognition, does a good job of filtering a high percentage of spam messages. (It sucked out 133 from my Inbox upon return to the office this a.m.) I usually have a false negative or two each day, and a false positive once a week or so.

It’s very easy to set up, and has, really, no learning curve. That’s in part because it pulls down pattern files from its central servers automagically (and, in turn, provides feedback from individuals about manually culled spam). It’s all supposedly private and secure, and it’s certainly convenient, but those who get nervous about such things would … well, get nervous.

You can do some configuration on it if you want — set how aggressive the program is, populate white lists and black lists from address books or mail folders, set specific “this is spam/this is not” rules, etc. But you can really get by pretty easily without doing so. And identifying a given e-mail as spam (or not), and adding addresses (or domains) to the white/black lists is extremely simple.

The program has some limited utilities to report spam back to ISPs (though the address fields are easily spoofed) or bounce the spam back as though your address is bad (though from what I read most spammers now ignore bounces as part of the cost of doing business).

The iHateSpam program only $20, and does the job well. A single license allows you to use it in both Outlook and Outlook Express, but the latter is an incredible kludge (due to the difficulty of grafting extensions into OE) and not worth the effort.