I run my own mail server. My mail server does a lousy job of stopping spam, but my e-mail client (Outlook Express running SpamBrave) does a pretty good job of it. What this means is that every spam message sent to my mail server comes to my computer, where it gets deleted. I get a little excited each morning when I open mail and see that I have 100 new messages. My excitement wanes as SpamBrave weeds out all the crap, leaving me with half a dozen or so messages left to peruse.
In the last 7 days I’ve had 996 spam e-mails hit my desktop, and received 97 legitimate messages. Probably 2/3 of those legitimate ones are what I call “legit spam”, messages from TigerDirect, NewEgg and Amazon begging me to spend even more money with them.
I really need to find a better spam filter at the server level …
Jeff pointed me toward a couple of different products for spam level filtering. While checking out one of those I realized I wasn’t using a blacklist at all. I’m now running everything through spamhaus which has cut my levels back tremendously. In fact, on average right now only about two an hour are getting through.