What’s the latest on dealing with junk mail these days? My main business contact has gone nuts in the last month with at times over 400 spams a day especially the last week. This is a real problem at those times, like now, when I’m limited to using my iPhone with no junk filter and a very small download limit. It’s really the first time in 15 years that it’s gotten quite this bad, and I’m usually VERY careful about not posting my raw email address anywhere. But some service I registered with may have screwed me recently.
Any advice, including nuking it from orbit etc…? I’d obviously rather avoid changing my email entirely.
Yeah, Gmail is pretty much the best I’ve seen at dealing with junk. I’d say that it catches about 99.99% of all the junk that comes to my account. I get one junk mail a week in my inbox, maybe. I don’t know if that’s an option for you, but if so, it’s worth considering.
Yep, I could have been clearer. I’ve had the same email address (provided by Datarealm as part of my website hosting since 1995) that directly identifies me and my business for about as long as I’ve been online, so changing it would be a real pain.
This happened to me once years ago when the address was harvested from my website (before I knew better) and I spent far too much time zealously chasing down any spam and getting it reported. Eventually it got to a low enough level that I could ignore whatever the Datarealm filters let through.
The main issue is having a system that I can use when on my iPhone. Perhaps a redirect to a gmail account would work then, at least until I get back. Not sure what Google Apps is (yeah, i’m getting old clearly) but I’ll check it out thanks.
The e-mail component of Google Apps is, to my understanding, a Gmail-like app that allows you to use your own e-mail address. You’re basically using Google’s servers to receive and send mail. It’s a matter of setting your zone records to point your mail to Google instead of to your current e-mail provider. The change is transparent to your correspondents.
Or, since we know you have your own domain now (right?) you could also setup Google’s Postini or similar service. Then you get a maintained spam filter for a couple of bucks a month. Setup, while probably not all that easy isn’t terribly hard either. Just point the DNS to postini and service would be uninterrupted. This way you wouldn’t have to transfer your email or even change anything on your iphone but you would be paying a small subscription fee.
Gmail’s spam filter is so good that it marked mail to me from the Google recruiter as spam!
To be fair, I get so much spam that a perfectly reasonable algorithm with a better than 99.99% success rate is: “Is the mail to Damien? Yes? Right, spam.”
Google Apps certainly looks pretty nice, thanks for the recs. I’ll try it out next time I find an Internet connection for the laptop. Yes I do have my own domain (several in fact) and the small fees involved would be more than worth it by the looks of things. I’ll let you know if I need any help Ryan, thanks.
It’s pretty easy to set up. I’m using it for my own domain, although I don’t get any email there, let alone spam. That’ll change once I start circulating the address, I’m sure.
It’s funny though, because I always look through my junk mail folder in Gmail every day just to make sure that a “real” mail didn’t accidentally get tossed in there (and every once in a while, one will.)
