Next step in my SPAM strategy
Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 09:35pm
Three months ago I talked about the first step I was making to move from a default permit strategy to a default deny strategy for dealing with spam. Instead of having messages to any address at my domain ending up in my inbox I setup forwarders so only messages to a hundred or so addresses (based on non-spam emails that I had kept) ended up in my inbox with the remainder ended up in my (previously unused) gmail account.
So what have I found over the past three months?
- between fifty to five hundred messages were delivered to my gmail account every day
- of these at most ten per day were not identified as spam
- I identified two addresses that I then added to my list of valid addresses
- only eight of the addresses in my list have received spam
- of these there is one that receives the majority of the spam, almost two thousand in the last two weeks
This evening I changed the catch-all so the default action for my domain is now to reject messages and removed the forwarder rule for the spammed address so messages to that address will also be rejected. My next action is to go through my list of addresses and change the ones that I don’t think I need anymore to forward to my gmail account. A few months after that I will remove them if they are actually no longer used.
