RE: OT : need advice on bluebottle
On Wednesday, June 28, 2006 1:25 PM -0500, Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
> So finally, I am considering discarding the gmail's service and
> getting a free account on bluebottle. Any advice in this regard is
> highly appreciated.
FWIW, I occasionally use gmail and have, but don't use much, a
bluebottle address. The spam problem is better addressed with gmail if
you use POP access to either of these providers and run a local spam
filter. With a good Bayesian filter, you will have very few false
positives. However, few != none, which is the root of the problem when
you have a lot of spam. The best solution, IMHO, is to use a mailer
that blocks as much spam as possible during the SMTP conversation.
While a legitimate message will occasionally be blocked, the sender
immediately receives a NDN and knows their message was not delivered.
With my own business email usage, this has averaged less than once a
year, and was easy to correct. Using well-chosen DNSBL's and other
heuristics as a basis to refuse messages cuts down your spam load to the
point that it is not difficult to manually view the titles of the few
that are left. This means either finding a provider that rejects spam
during the SMTP conversation or setting up your own MTA.
Post-acceptance spam filtering works well only when there is not much
spam to filter. I strongly agree that manually scanning a large spam
folder every day is tiresome and error-prone. Rejecting messages at
SMTP time, rather than accepting and silently dropping them (essentially
what a large spam folder forces you to do), is the better way to go.
As for CR systems like bluebottle's, I find those so annoying that I
sometimes elect not to deal with them. That is why I turn off
bluebottle's CR. If that account starts to receive a significant amount
of spam, I will abandon it. Same for gmail and any other provider that
fails to reject most spam during SMTP.
--
Seth Goodman
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