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Coping with spam on multiple devices
Here's a problem that some of us may be coming up against.
I use a Mac Mini as my main (desktop) computer; I run Mozilla Thunderbird on it as my email client. Mozilla's not bad at coping with spam, and I've found the most powerful way to block spam is to use whitelists -- in other words, to tell the system that if the person sending me a message is not in my address book, that message is likely to be spam.
That'll all well and good, but what happens when you travel?
I use an iPad for travel, and use its built-in email client, which is very nice, but incredibly has no spam blocker.
So on a normal day when I should be getting, say, 30 or 40 emails, I get hundreds -- and have to sift through them. On a small device. This sucks.
The solution is -- or rather, one solution is -- to use Gmail. Gmail retrieves messages from my POP3 server using the labourstart.org address; I send messages out from it using my labourstart.org address as the sender and reply-to address.
And Gmail is great at blocking spam.
So now I won't see all the spam messages on my iPad, nor on my smartphone for that matter either (if I ever get around to setting up email on that device ...)
How do you cope with spam when you're travelling? Or in general?
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Nick Holden on -
Running my own mail server probably gives me a slightly different perspective on this. But the single biggest impact I've made to the amount of spam running through my mail server (an impact of the order of a 95% reduction in spam) is to equip the server with RBL lookup. It's a basic and simple step that every ISP should use, but surprisingly, many do not.
For quite a long time I didn't use RBL lookup on my server, having read lots of articles suggesting it was 'old hat' and not flexible enough, but the impact of adding that - to an anti-spam arsenal that already included a spam filter, Bayesian analysis and anti-virus scanning - has been phenomenal. Instead of having a couple of hundred spam emails reach my PC each day, I now have maybe half a dozen.
I'd encourage anybody thinking about getting 'corporate' email through their own domain (for a trade union branch and its officers, for instance) to ensure that the service they use has a sophisticated anti-spam strategy, including (as a minimum) several RBL lookups, Bayesian filtering and anti-virus scanning. That way, the spam just never reaches your account, and you don't have to worry about how to process it. -
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