Rodent Regatta

Thursday night, 9-12-02, I installed the 14-day trial of SpamAssassin Pro from Deersoft, Inc. This is the product that is based upon the technology in SpamAssassin, which is the spam fighter for Unix email servers. Bottom line: SpamAssassin Pro is leaking like it was shot with a shotgun.
I installed the product at 7:45pm. It trapped a spam message at 7:48 and I thought, ”this is it!” I checked email again at 9:30pm. SA had put 7 junk emails in the junk folder, but 4 pieces of spam were in my inbox.
At 8:00am the next morning, I had 48 spam emails that SA had moved to the junk folder. However, immediately after checking email, I began to receive spam messages that SA didn’t or couldn’t trap. Throughout Friday, I was having to manually tell SA to block certain email senders. This effort is very similar to building rules in Outlook.
After clearing both the junk folder and the inbox of all spam last night at 5pm, I didn’t check email again until today at 2pm. There were 14 pieces of spam in the junk folder, but 40 pieces of spam in my inbox. How on earth did the spammers figure out so quickly how to get by SA? It’s frustrating. My next trial is probably going to be Walter Mossberg’s suggestion of ChoiceMail.

Saturday: Dropping Spammers from Great Heights. Good news! The state of Washington won its first anti-spam case ! Huzzah. The law here says that unsolicited email is not per se illegal, but rather is a civil violation if it fails to include a legitimate return address, has a misleading subject line, is mailed to Washington state individuals who have opted out from receiving UCE, or misuses Internet resources, like relaying through mail servers that don’t allow this (even if they’re technically set up to allow it). Here’s the law … [GlennLog]