E-mail switch

[cjsmith]

HAHAHAHA I have just flipped the switch to send pretty much all of my e-mail to my new sooper sekrit shell account. This account HAS SPAM FILTERS thankyouverymuch, and it is (so far) completely uncompromised -- I have never received a piece of spam sent directly to that address. The only spam I get there is forwarded from my existing known e-mail address, which is about to DIE DIE DIE.

(Too bad, really. Bayarea, my soon-to-be-ex-provider, has been good to me in every way but this. They have all the stuff I want in a shell account -- telnet and FTP capability, emacs, calendar, some tiny amount of public web space, use of a compiler, very very little downtime. But they do not take spam seriously.)

Now I just need to spend a week or two seeing what still comes in on that account, noting who sent it, and telling all legitimate folks what address to use instead.

This feels sooooooooooo good.

LJ folks: my at livejournal address works fine.

Comments

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

telling all legitimate folks

What about us illegitimate ones? ;-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Don't talk about your mother like that! ;-)

[firecat]

Yeah. [sigh] I dumped bayarea.net a while back in favor of panix (for shell) and pair.com (for web site) because panix is much better at keeping their shell programs up to date. both have good spam filtering (using spamassassin on panix).

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Spam Assassin sounds good -- at one time I was trying to install it in my bayarea homedir.

I should check out panix for pricing. Back when I signed up with bayarea, $30/month looked good. Now I suspect I could do much better.

[firecat]

I did install it. But I prefer using the ISP's Spamassassin, because it needs frequent updating.

Panix = $100/year prepaid for telnet-only shell access.

[hanov3r.livejournal.com]

Not only is panix competitively priced, their abuse team is top notch. They're *death* on spam, both incoming and outgoing.

There's always the option of doing your own spam filtering - I'm reading my mail in pine in a shell, and I've got procmail and the SpamBouncer (http://www.spambouncer.com) running on my incoming mail. I don't use it to report spam - just filter the mail I want into folders and throw the spam into its own folder to look at later. I see very few false positives.

[sharya.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about doing that; how does it work in terms of replying? I get a ton of spam, and I have more email addresses than I need, certainly... I've often thought about redirecting them to come to one particular email address (probably gmail since it does such a good job of spam handling)... but I haven't figured out how to make it look like I'm replying from each individual email address, and not the one super secret one... know what I mean?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

My mail program is text, not MIME or anything else spiffy, so what I do is I type up at the top "From: my@public.address" and ship it out. There's enough information in the headers for a smart person to figure out my sooper sekrit address, so I just have to hope I'm not sending mail out to any spammers. :)

[dethtonge.livejournal.com]

MAKE.MONEY.FAST

[just-cyd.livejournal.com]

*gasp!*

i've been using that email for you for AGES ... *counts*</> ... probably 8 years now. good lord, has it' been that long...?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I was still working at Teknowledge when I set that up, so yeah. Teknowledge, a little time off, a little over four years total at the startup and its purchaser, a YEAR off (woo hoo!), and now a year and a half at my present job. (Is it sad that I count by jobs? Nah.) 8's about right.