Spam Detection

Have you noticed that in the past few months the spammers have figured out how to get spam past the email providers.

Apparently the spam classifiers can't pick up on the fact that the text of the spam is an image. Anyway.. until AOL, Yahoo and others figure out a solution here is a good way to determine if an email is spam.

Many mail programs allow you to setup filters and most of this spam does not actually have your email address in the To: line so setting up a filter is really easy

In yahoo I did the following

1st I created a new folder called not-me

Then in mail options I setup the following filter.

If...

To/CC does not contain " Your Email Address Here @yahoo.com"

Then...

Move message to not me folder

Now I get about 40 emails a day in my not me folder. Occasionally it will be a newsletter that I am subscribed to, that sends to me via a listserv emal address, but about 99% of the messages in this folder are spam.

I still get about 1 spam a day that is actually addressed to my email address but that's better than the 60 that arrived in my inbox daily before.
Unfortunately I can't really do this at work since 80% of my emails come from listservs. :-(

For AIM/AOL I read my email via Thunderbird and I have a similar filter setup. Outlook also has filtering capability but I don't think the AOL client or AOL/AIM web mail have filters. Someone please correct me on this. :-)
Wondering how to read your AIM/AOL mail via IMAP? All the details are here