Another sentry

About two-thirds of the junk email that's sent my way never makes it to my inbox: the server has a fairly extensive array of filters, although the evil dweebs (pus be upon them) who send this stuff are constantly modifying it to sneak past the guard. And I have a fair number of Outlook Express (yes, yes, I know, I know) filters to weed through what's left. Still, I'm having to write one or two filters a week, and this is more attention than I'd rather give the aforementioned evil dweebs, so when I installed the newest security package from these people, I decided I'd look at their anti-spam product.

It's an interesting mixture of slick and cumbersome. Most people, I suspect, will not encounter much of the cumbersomeness, simply because most people don't have ten years' worth of email sitting in the database. (Seriously: it goes back to May 1997 and takes up about a third of a gigabyte. And that's the stuff I chose to keep; imagine how much I threw away.) The first thing it does is go through the database and identify Approved Senders, which are defined apparently as those senders whose mail I didn't trash. In not too much time, the program had amassed a list of 6,350 of them, which I decided to sort by number of appearances. Apart from newsletters and such, and my own outgoing mail (which, after all, is saved in Sent Items), there were two individuals with over 700 appearances, and five between 500 and 700. The vast majority, of course, have only one or two.

What you want to know, though, is "How reliable is it?" I don't know; it was only just installed a couple of hours ago. So far, it's batting a thousand: everything I wanted to read has been sent to Inbox, and everything I didn't has been quarantined. I'll watch it for the next week or so to see how things work out.

Posted at 6:30 PM to PEBKAC