'I get no spam' - a quote by John C. Dvorak. He is referring to an email filtering system which offers a highly effective approach to spam detection, offered by Computer Tyme, a small service provider with a website at junkemailfilter.com.

As you can imagine I get many many emails since I not only run this blog but several other sites and domains. A couple of years ago the amount of spam I was receiving got severely out of hand. I was finding myself spending incrasing amounts of time on wading through spam and I was losing time and money. Something had to be done. After trying a lot of approaches including server side blacklists via SpamAssassin as well as client side filtering I gave junkemailfilter.com a try. I haven't looked back since.

What I like about the service is the fact that spam never even touches my mail server, instead it is filtered beforehand. That means I no longer have to download tons of spam emails which get sorted into a junk email folder, which I in turn have to wade through anyway to check for false positives. Junkemailfilter.com acts as a kind of proxy mail server to any domains I add to it, meaning that mail for my sites is delivered to their mail servers where it is filtered and only the good mail is forwarded to me. To make it effective they deploy every anti spam trick in the book, starting with intentionally invalid MX records (spammers often only try the first MX record, then give up if that fails) to 'normal' filters such as SpamAssassin. In fact most spam is rejected right at connect time to the mail server, and overall Junkemailfilter.com has over 99% accuracy.

You can read more about how it works here.

So if you have a problem with spam then drop Marc Perkel at Computer Tyme a note. If you do, or if you are already using his service, then please leave a comment and tell us about your experiences. I'm glad to say that I am in the same camp as John C. Dvorak: I get no spam.


Posted on December 29, 2008 at 11:42 AM. 2701 views. 4 comments. Print