Wham, bam, thank you, spam!

Never have I been so pleased to receive spam. I imagine shortly after writing this, I'll have grown tired of the whole thing, but for now, I'm reveling in the beauty of the new "statistics" feature built into the latest update of MailWasher Pro. For anyone with serious spam problems, I heartily recommend this software. It does a tremendous job of quickly filtering spam, using black lists from multiple sources (two are preprogrammed, but their website gives you more addresses that you simply add to the configuration file).

I've been using MailWasher software for well over a year, and MailWasher Pro since last March. The latest version, however, features a slick new user interface, and a "Statistics" area that gives you charts categorizing the type of spam you get, and the percentage of "good" to bad mail. Since I installed this version a week ago, the statistics page reported that I had received 566 pieces of mail, of which 87% was spam. And (here's the part I love) nearly 90% of the spam was detected by my own spam filters, with the remaining 10% being detected by blacklist servers.

I keep separate email addresses for every service I've signed up for, so I can track the source of my spam. In the previous version of MailWasher, I had simply put the description "Filtered" on all my custom filters. This past week, I labeled each filter with a meaningful tag, so I could see where my spam is coming from. Nearly 70% is going to one email address (which I used over two years ago to sign up in a webcam community when I first got a webcam). So, either they're selling their list, or their site is easy to hack. I suppose I should visit the site to check their "opt out" policy.

Tomorrow.