Paying Spam to Go Away
I’m going to start this story by doing something that most web experts will tell you that you should never, ever do: if you want to send me feedback directly, you can write me at MikeG1@larkfarm.com. Yes, that’s my real, primary e-mail address, sitting out there in the open, unobfuscated, on a high-traffic web site, just waiting for the spam harvesters to come along. I’m not worried about it, because their junk is never going to get as far as my inbox.
Like many web workers, I’ve been on the web for years, and I’ve been using that e-mail address for most of a decade now. It’s plastered all over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of web pages. In addition, most of my business is done over the Web. So I get a lot of e-mail: around 47,000 messages so far this year. 35,000 of those messages – about 75% – were spam that vanished into thin air before they ever got to me.
How do I know this? Because after years of messing around with other alternatives (and believe me, I tried a lot of them, from the laughably inadequate junk-mail filtering built into Exchange to the pretty darned good SpamBayes add-in for Outlook) I wised up and signed up with SpamStopsHere, a service of Michigan-based Greenview Data. If you maintain your own e-mail (technically speaking, if you can set your own MX records), it’s simply the best way that I’ve found to make my spam someone else’s problem.
In practice, using SpamStopsHere is simple. You sign up with their service, and they give you the addresses of some of their servers to act as mail relays. You make those servers your primary servers for incoming e-mail. All of your e-mail then goes through the SpamStopsHere servers, where the spam gets disposed of (I like to think of it as being eaten by giant rats, though I’m sure that’s just my own particular fantasy) and the good mail is sent on its way to your own original incoming mail server.
You can set things up so you can check the spam yourself by hand to make sure that legitimate messages aren’t being trapped, but after a few weeks of manually doing this I stopped bothering – I saw absolutely no false positives, and no one has ever complained about legitimate mail not getting through to me. There’s also a nice page of statistics to show you just how much is getting blocked and by which filters. The nice thing about this system is that not only does the spam go away, but it doesn’t even fill up my incoming bandwidth.
SpamStopsHere uses a variety of techniques to identify spam, most notably a database of URLs and phone numbers that identify spammy messages, specific phrase and pattern matching, country of origin filters, blacklists, and more. There’s a Web control panel that lets you tweak exactly which categories of filtering you use, and you can optionally virus scan your incoming mail as well. (I do. No more viruses.) I am fairly cautious about the settings I make, to be sure that I don’t block legitimate e-mail, with the result that I’m still seeing 5-10 spam mails per day, but compared to the hundreds getting blocked that’s nothing.
Pricing is on a sliding scale depending on how many mailboxes you’re protecting, starting at $19 per month or $190 per year for a single domain with 10 mailboxes, or $238 per year if you add virus scanning to the mix. There’s also a free 30-day trial. If you’re at the end of your rope with free approaches to wiping out spam, and your time spent reading and deleting it is worth something, I recommend taking a look.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
I may not get as much mail as you, but GMail’s spam filter I find second to none.
I just use SpamSieve with Mail.app. My statistics are probably close to yours, but I don’t get any spam – and when I say any, I mean none, nada, zero. I don’t see the point of paying $190 a year when I can do it with a $30 app – the only advantage being the bandwidth gained.
I forgot to mention, if you manage your own domain, another cool idea against spam is to use a catch-all e-mail address. So when you are registering for a web site that you don’t trust, you can give them a special e-mail ID such as “shady-site@your-domain.com”. If you end up getting spam to that e-mail address in the future, you will know exactly where it is coming from (or who sold your address to spammers), and block it easily.
I get essentially the same service for free by forwarding all my mail from several accounts to Gmail, then forwarding from Gmail back to an unpublished account on my mail server. Gmail stops 99% of the spam, and you can’t beat the price.
Catch-all accounts seem like a good idea until the day that your domain is hit by a dictionary attack, and you get literally hundreds of thousands of spams to every conceivable word @ your domain.
SpamSieve is indeed excellent for Mail.app users. And GMail’s filters do a great job – though I find I average 3-5 spams getting through their filters on my GMail account.
SpamStopsHere isn’t for everyone, obviously. It gets more useful as you’re responsible for more mailboxes (keeps viruses and spam out of the kids’ mail too), more domains, more e-mail clients and more operating systems, and just don’t want to fuss with multiple setups and tweaking. As always, when asking yourself what the tradeoffs are between doing it yourself and contracting out, you have to evaluate what your time is worth. I easily spent ten hours messing around with spam filters on our domain the year before I went to SpamStopsHere. For me, the math was a no-brainer.
I dont think you should have to pay for spam to go away, that really bites.
I have been having increasing problems with GMail and see a lot of spam getting through, even though I keep marking them “spam” it is a shame because GMail isa pretty nifty service.
I liked mail.app’s (Apple mail’s) spam filter, I was getting 1,000/day but Apple’s filter killed it to 20-30, but I’m finding myself increasingly using a pda, public computer, or my spare laptop without time to sync up the spam preferences. I used gmail to filter, but it was still letting in over 100/day after 2 month’s training, so this service looks appealing to me, thanks! I’m trying it out for the free month, but even off the bat just tonight it’s all but eliminated the constant trickle of spam.
I run mail from 3 different domains, i think about 8 accounts in total, through spamstopshere. It really is a an amazing product. I get perhaps one piece of spam per month!
December last year saw 8,600 messages go to the keeper (spam) and the rest hit my inbox (legit messages).
I recommend this if you manage multiple addresses and multiple domains.