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Is it time to consider closed systems?

Internet users deluged by spam are resorting to the tactics of medieval castle guards who barred all strangers at the gate. Some say the medium of e-mail as a place for informal, even intimate, conversation is the real casualty of the new anti-spam counteroffensive. [Wired News]

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How Apple’s Spam Filter Stacks Up

I won’t say I don’t receive pitches for the occasional mortgage discount or Vegas vacation, the latest performance-enhancing elixir or anatomical wonder pills. In general, though, I’ve had good results with a built-in spam stopper in Apple’s Mail program, which I’ve used daily since it was released with the Jaguar update of OS X last year. [osOpinion]

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Microsoft takes spam plan to Washington

Chairman Bill Gates writes a letter advocating a combination of law and self-regulation by the industry to stop unwanted e-mail. [CNET News.com Entertainment & Media]

First – here’s a link to the Bill Gates Letter.

While the ADV subject line would be easy to filter for unsolicited emails, it would also completely kill any and all attempts for legit acquisition marketing. The average consumer does not truly understand how their name might be sold or traded through a list broker, nor do they really want to.

If, as a marketer we decide to purchase a list of likely candidate (legally of course), we might now expect to get an extremely low response rate which in effect would kill that aspect of marketing. Customer communications seem easy to maintain with this proposed regulation, but unless someone devises a new way for “customer introduction marketing” a new message from a third party seems to be something that will automatically be filtered to junk.

As someone who gets a great deal of spam – 101 messages since I left the office at 7pm last night, I can certainly appreciate wanting it to go away, and for penalties for those who are blatant abusers. I just don’t see why a solid filter can’t be deployed that can work on a massive level. My use of POPFile has literally gotten 100 of the 101 messages in the last 13 hours. I think that is pretty amazing, and something many others would get a great deal of use from. We just need it installed at the server level, not the user level since it is way to complex a system for mass adoption.

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So nice…

At the end of a truly hectic day at work I was greeted by an amazing piece of Spam. This is better than a previous note I received. Though not as wacky, it is certainly creative and even though clearly spam, worth re-publishing…

You Can Purchase 1 Acre of Land on the Moon $29.99. Stake Your Claim Now

Moon Land For Sale, unbelievable, but true.

The Perfect gift
Great Long-Term investment
You retain full mineral rights
A Great conversation piece

Stake your claim

In 2003, the Trailblazer, a TransOrbital mission to the Moon, will deposit the names of the property holders listed in the database, on the actual Lunar surface.

Each package contains the deed for one acre of land and it lists the actual location of the property by quadrant, latitude and longitude.

A lunar map accompanies this, marked with an X showing the location of the property.

1 Acre of Land on the Moon $29.99

http://www.lunarlandrush.com

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POPFile is back…

I guess I was moving too quickly earlier this week when I ruled POPFile out as a solution for Entourage Spam Filtering thinking that it could only support Subject modification and not extra headers… Seems in fact that it can do the X-Text-Classification: method which is great since my accuracy scoring with POPFile is excellent – 97+%. I have SpamSieve set to run in my rules right after POPFile searches for Spam which lets me catch any loose ends. All this stuff drops into my Spam folder for checking and deletion.

POPFile is a much stronger solution to SpamSieve though together they seem like a solid bullet-proof vest for spam.

Since POPFile requires a bit more technical oomph to get going, I thought it would be once again worth while to link to Michael Artz’ excellent instructions for installation on Mac OS X.

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MailBlocks to Challenge Hotmail, Defeat Spam

Seems very interesting and could be a winner for many people currently hooked on WebMail and getting slammed by Spam. I think they should offer a free trial though to show how easy it would be to start using a different service as the average WebMail user is not paying anything and probably reasonably comfortable with how things currently work. I would want to see that you also get POP or IMAP access for the fee you since this is now a “premium” service…

Update – The NYT is covering this story today as well. And now so is CNet

MailBlocks.com

I got briefed on this last week (lauches today, was sworn to secrecy): MailBlocks.com, which aims to unseat Hotmail as the preferred web-based email application with one secret weapon: effective spam blocking. It uses a “challenge/response” technique (i.e., anyone sending you an email not in your address book or to whom you’ve sent emails in the past will be sent an email asking them to demonstrate they are human using CAPTCHA). I demoed it for a week, and it seems to work reasonably well. Costs $9.95 a year. Started by Phil Goldman, co-founder of WebTV. I think this will be a winner. I also expect they’ll be this week’s media darlings.

[marketingfix]

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What Spam Filter Are You?

You’re a Bayesian Filter!

A Bayesian filter, such as POPFile, will quietly discard any type of mail you don’t want to read. You train the program by correcting its “junk” or “not junk” guesses on individual messages. Over time, the programs statistical accuracy improves dramatically, to the point where it can be trusted to file junk mail into a separate folder.

No algorithm is perfect, though. When new spam styles arrive, the program needs retraining. You should also check your junk-mail folder periodically for false positives, lest you miss your wife’s Valentine’s Day message from the airport kiosk. (True story.)

In a past life you might have been:
A Collaborative filter
A Whitelist program
No filter at all

Interesting how that worked out for me… I use POPFile and love it! What filter are you – take the quiz at Slate.

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My Plan for Spam…

This past week I have been messing with a couple of tools: Zoë and POPfile.

POPfile, pre-checks, classifies and buckets my mail into the following categories: Commerce, Lists, Newsletters, Personal, Spam and Work

Mail then checks POPfile and can immediate sort spam to Junk as well as handle my other buckets in ways I want via rules.

Zoë also checks POPFile and messages it missed during the day are imported nightly or on demand. Zoë (mostly) skips flagged as spam messages from the x-header info assigned by POPfile leaving a (relatively, minus the rogue spam) clean database to locally search as my archive. Within Zoë you can see by date, subject, or person what communications have transpired. Mail can currently only search, but not cross reference, so this is a powerful addition. Zoë includes a fantastic tool in the way of a bundle file so from directly within Mail, you can link into Zoë by clicking on people or dates…

Zoë can also handle RSS… You can view your mail in newsreaders, or import your subscriptions (text or opml) directly into Zoë. You might like this to store and archive all messages from the sites you read locally, since newsreader tend to have a short memory.

How it all works….

POPfile is amazing!
Classification Accuracy
Emails classified: 971
Classification errors: 62
Accuracy: 93.61%

But not that simple an install… On Mac OS X you must read this. It will walk through the details. Following them through step by step should get you going… In just about 2 days I am batting 100% filtering to Junk in Mail. POPfile score more critically based on the bucket success and so far I am at just over 93% accuracy. A few more days and I should be very close to 100% there as well. I also turned the quarantine function on within POPfile for my spam bucket which kills web bugs and graphics on those messages. I did add an additional rule (beyond one for each bucket) to capture the quarantined messages since some of them slipping through.

Zoë is also a very cool tool, though I tried to push it further than it can go at this point (v. 0.4). I POP into POPfile and use Zoe for SMTP… any message I send is catalogued in Zoë which is very cool. Many messages I receive are not immediately in there, until after an import. Not a big deal for now… Things got funky when I realized that Zoë also had a pop server.

I tried to set up a workflow like this – Mail => Zoë => POPfile

Issues –

It is very tricky to get this to work. In theory it does work, but Zoe actually sends every message into Mail every time you check…argh. (I have been told that by leaving mail on server in Mail this can be avoided) I also noticed that Zoe (somehow) did not capture some messages I received in Mail. I know that might seem impossble, but it is the reality. Pretty sure it is a bug, which has now been reported.

Otherwise, using things as I originally set them up, I am working very efficiently in email. The new tools I have added to my workflow have made a significant difference in the way I manage messages.

PS – SpamFire, which I previously raved about has been put to rest based on much better I feel the control and performance is with POPfile. Your mileage may vary…

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Referral Spam must stop

It has been talked about before on other blogs, but I guess they finally found me…

I received my first referral spam from a company in Colorado called Clutch Interactive (no link will be provided). As I was browsing, blogdex in Net News Wire, I realized that they have figured out a way to make it look like we are talking about them as well – it’s called Webmaster offer. Blogdex tracks the blog chatter and somehow the CI folks have figured a way to leech inside. This must be stopped immediately. I know of no way to filter this, yet….anyone have a thought?