So, the spam situation was getting a little extreme. With 27669 between the start of this month and up to midnight this morning, I'm averaging 1.75 spams per minute. Real e-mail tends to get a little lost amongst that. While my own filters could filter about 50% of the spam out a few months ago, I was lucky if it was getting 5% of it as definite spam, and probable real mail was regularly hitting 1000 emails a day - needless to say, most of them were spam.

A couple of days ago, I set up my mailserver as a mail relay, but I found out today that most of my e-mails I had sent weren't getting through. Eventually tracked it down to an IP blacklist, who had blacklisted the whole of pipex, which means I'll have to fiddle with that a bit more. However, while wading through my spam looking for the returned mails, I found an e-mail from a friend I hadn't heard from for ages. Pure fluke, if I hadn't been in there, I wouldn't have noticed and would have just junked it.

So I decided that enough was enough. I had set up my mail server with a view to dealing with spam at a later time. That time had now come; it was time to take some action. For those of you who don't know much about computers, I drew a picture of what that action may look like:


For those of you who do know about computers, I have installed SpamAssassin. Haven't trained the Bayesian filter yet, but I've been running it out of the box for about an hour with an impressive 93% success rate! 80 spams junked, 6 let through. Now, 144 spams a day I can handle, and with some decent Bayesian filtering, hopefully I can make it even better :)

The only problem with Bayesian training is that they suggest training it with 1000 spams and 1000 non-spams. The 1000 spams obviously aren't a problem, but I don't have many friends, how am I supposed to get anywhere near 1000 for the ham?! I don't even get near it when I add my hate mail! Damn the server crash of '03, I'd kept every email going back to when I came on the internet. That would have got me 10th of the way there...

Still, I'm feeling positive, and hope that the battle over my inbox has taken a turn in the right direction.

In other news, today has been my first full day at home with nothing to do since, er, last summer, how nice. I spent it speccing up a Doom 3 machine... Well, this one is 3 years old now, time for an upgrade! Also watched a video about halflife 2 - mmmm, it looks good.