Spam vs. Ham?
A posting over at 37 Signals’ Signal vs. Noise brought to my attention two interesting spam related services: Mailinator and Spam Gourmet. Both perform essentially the same service—they allow you to easily create disposable email addresses.
While both are useful, I find that I just don’t sign up for obvious spam generating sites anymore making this service of questionable value to me. That said, I do get a ton of spam, but they are for email addresses that are “already out there” and ones that I don’t want to give up. Caution with new sites then doesn’t serve me any purpose since I’m already getting about 50+ spams a day on addresses that I’m stuck with for the rest of time.
But that’s where Apple’s Mail client comes in. I have been really careful to never mark legitimate but unwanted email as junk. I would say it has a 95% success rate for flagging spam, and I’ve only had one false positive to date. While the three or so spams that make it through are annoying, they aren’t annoying enough to cause me to come up with a whole new solution.
Though presumably this problem is going to get worse. If the number of spams increases tenfold and the accuracy remains the same, I’m looking at 30 or so in my inbox. That is unacceptable. This makes me want to try SpamSieve, which judging by this interview over at Daring Fireball with Michael Tsai, is much better than Apple Mail.
The arms race continues…
