Spam be damned

I mentioned this weekend that I had installed a newish anti-spam product on my home box, and I promised updates. This is one.

This package used to be called Qurb, and was purchased by the drones of Computer Associates, who promptly slapped their own name on it. (CA's old EZ brand seems to be an endangered species.) It is a very specific tool: it hooks into Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express — I see no evidence that it works with anything else — and it indexes your entire mail database at installation.

First day in, the package went through all my mail folders except Deleted Items and added all the names therein to the Approved Senders list, on the basis that if I kept something you sent me, I presumably want to hear from you. Some people are in there two or three times, by dint of having had multiple email addresses over the ten years I've been accumulating this mail. There was also one simple toolbar added to the client.

It's interesting to watch it work, as incoming messages are routed to the Inbox and stuff deemed spam remains on screen for maybe a third of a second before it vanishes into the quarantine folder. You can select daily or hourly intervals to have the quarantine list popped up, and if anything is in there that you want to keep, you can move it to Inbox and mark the sender Approved.

Operation is pretty much seamless. I have the quarantine opened every four hours, and I have "Verify Sender Domains" toggled on. Interestingly, no formal spam scoring takes place until the first mail is received and learning mode kicks in; after that, I have automatic disapproval on anything over 90 percent and no automatic approval (these are the defaults).

To give you an idea of the volumes around here, about 70 percent of incoming mail — let's say 500 out of 700 items a week — will be caught by the mail server's filters. In the period since installing the CA/Qurb package, 66 items were sent to quarantine; two were pulled out for being sufficiently unspamlike and their senders were subsequently Approved. No items that I deem unacceptable for my Inbox were allowed through.

Inasmuch as this thing doesn't seem to mess up the databases, or to suck up vast quantities of system resources, I have to pronounce it a success, though obviously I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't using Microsoft's otherwise-ghastly mail clients.

Posted at 6:32 AM to PEBKAC , Scams and Spams