Re: Holy Spam!

[Dan Anderson <dan@mathjunkies.com>]

I've had very good success with the following:

1) Send all e-mails with your name not listed as a receipient to a
probable spam folder.  After a few weeks of tweaking (mailing lists and
newsletters will get send there too) you will find just about everything
in there the probable spam folder is spam -- and can be deleted
accordingly.
2) Anytime a major virus comes up filter out common text in the message
body if it comes through.

The following are useful if you know a language like Perl and can pipe
your mail through it (not very hard):
3) (A little more tricky) Create "Whitelists" -- people who you know you
can trust.  Any mail from these people gets sent to your inbox -- don't
accidentally delete an important e-mail!
4) Anything with .pif, .bat, .exe attached is probably spam.  Quarantine
it (unless it's from your somebody on your whitelist). 
5) Make anybody e-mailing to your address who is not on your whitelist
(besides listservs!) respond to an automatic reply to be added to your
whitelist.  Most spammers won't respond (although people on the listserv
may get angry and block your e-mail. See caveat re: listservs).
6) Keep a listserv list and other lists in a database so it is portable
wherever you go.

This has successfully helped me send over 2k emails to /dev/null today. 
I highly recommend it.

-Dan