In the last two years online spam has increased exponentially. Until a few months ago, I used to get a 1:1 ratio of spam messages relative to personalized messages, addressed to me. Somehow, when I post comments on external sites or list an email address online like at the LinkedIN OpenNetworker Group, these email ids tend to attract “lottery winnings”, “15M transfer to my bank account”, “great stock picks” and the many other mails not worth mentioning.

I used a POP3 personalized domain name for most of these domain names. Many suggested I need to block out the known spammer IPs at the mail box level, which I did. Spam still made it through. Others suggested Spam-Assassin and this helped a bit, but I still had to deal with the false positives and false negatives – real messages making it as SPAM and SPAM messages making it to the inbox.

At the time I used Outlook, and many Thunderbird users mentioned that they had a sophisticated Bayesian filtering mechanism, so I switched for the reason that I didn’t need to try and to get my head around false positives and false negatives. This did cut down the spam, but there were many plugins for Outlook, not yet in Thunderbird, so I invested in Spam assassin for a year to get Bayesean filter and a challenge response mechanism to resolve my spam problem.

After two years of my quest to manage email SPAM, reducing false positives and false negatives, I finally have this problem contained. For me, what helped was switching my mail servers to Google Premier Apps, and letting Google filter out false positives, negatives. I shifted out of Outlook totally, as I find the Google Gmail interface more intuitive and I spend less time looking for email than in Outlook. Anotion option is MailGuard for medium sized businesses or enterprises, that I am currently evaluating and has many added benefits on top of Google Premier Apps, which is a seperate blog in itself.

Here is another tip. If you are listing your email on the web, obfuscriate your email id using this handy tool. Hence I can write my email here  without having to worry about attracting spammers, unless they want to fall in the permanent black hole quickly, with my few clicks.