[Web4lib] Webmail and the ocean of spam

[Francis Kayiwa]

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On Feb 15, 2006, at 6:27 PM, Stacy Pober wrote:

> I am drowning in spam.  Partly this is because my email address is  
> on most of
> our library's webpages.  While I can change this, it's in the "closing
> the barn door after the horses got out" category.  I'm sure my work  
> address is
> on just about every spammer's list that exists.
>
> The filtering on our webmail does not work well.  Addresses that are
> specifically blacklisted or filtered are still getting through.  I'm
> looking into alternatives that will still allow me to use our
> institution's webmail.  I  don't want to have to download mail and  
> filter
> it locally.  In part this is because I've discovered that  
> Thunderbird gets
> slow as mud when you have a lot of saved messages.  And also, I  
> work from three
> different computers, and would rather keep the saved mail on our  
> central
> server.

I am a bit confused here. Webmail is simply a user agent (aka  
"client") that retrieves your messages from a maildrop/server. Based  
on the mail headers of your messages it seems like you are using the  
horde projects IMP to check your messages. Configuring your "user  
agent" to filter spam IMHO is too late because the messages have  
already been retrieved once your authenticated to your mailserver.  
Certainly blacklisting them should be done before it gets delivered  
to be effective. I have never used IMP so it may have capabilities  
that I do not know about and will not comment further on this. :-)

Others have suggested Thunderbird and I have to join the parade.  
Thunderbird also is a mail user agent in the same way that  
"webmail" (really IMP :-)) is. You would need to configure all your  
Thunderbird instances to retrieve your mail using the IMAP protocol.  
This will leave all your messages on your maildrop/server. Using this  
protocol means that you will have seamlessness and continue to use  
IMP or any other IMAP protocol configured user agent. Your messages  
"unless you forgot to logout of one of the computers" -in which case  
you may have a locked session- will look the same on all of them.

If you use OSX then I would have encouraged you to use Mail.app +  
SpamSieve or like I do have your computer have run its own mailserver  
+ Spamassasin that uses excellent heuristics and bayesian filtering  
to catch ALL spam (rap on wood)

>
> I'm considering using either a commercial spam filtering service, or a
> spam control service using captchas if I can find it.  I know it's  
> annoying,
> but they do work.  I would probably have to forward all my mail  
> through
> that service to a new, 'clean' webmail address at the college.

Now that would be make interesting service... but having my mail go  
through a third party gives me the willies. :-)

>
> Questions:
> Any recommendations for filtering services?  I would particularly  
> like to use
> a challenge system using captchas, but I have to be able to exempt  
> list
> mail from that, so it must be configurable.
>
> And is there an email program that will handle huge quantities of  
> local
> stored mail without bogging down the way Tbird does?  (I want to
> avoid microsoft products if at all possible).

Since you are not keen on Thunderbird, bookmark and watch Sylpheed  
Claws.

http://claws.sylpheed.org/win32/

Sadly for Microsoft Windows users the development seems to have  
stalled but when not using OSX's Mail.app I like using Sylpheed... I  
am not sure how much Mail you have but I have colleagues with over  
5GB (not a typo) worth of mail using Thunrderbird quite happily.

regards,
Francis

===============
Francis Kayiwa
Library Systems Team
4-180, MC 234
T: +1.312.996.2716
W: http://www.uic.edu/~kayiwa
Key: http://tigger.uic.edu/~kayiwa/kayiwa.gpg


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