The eBay sales are all done. I made another half.com sale last night, before switching to Vacation mode on half.com. I like the fact that half.com pays by direct deposit every 15 days; that’s handy. Of course, I had to fix the direct deposit information with them this morning, and may have lost my $4.95 late-December payment. But, eh. I’m not wild about losing it, but is it really worth getting worked up about? No. I consider that to be $5 of testing the Half.com deposit system; I’ve lost more $$ for less return, let me tell ya.
Anyway, this morning I started the PayPal transfer of $139 for the eBay sales into my checking account to go towards the iPod. When I get back from Las Vegas, I’ll place the order at Circuit City. With any luck (haha), the price will have dropped a little bit. Or, if not, at least I’ll have a 2 week grace period in which, if it does drop, I can get a refund to the lower price.
The long (sorry), but useful (you’re welcome) post this morning about spam filters prompted me to submit a Support request, which was answered satisfactorily in an IC by the lovely and talented . Just mentioning it here in case you wanted to see what happens when scratches her head.
I have 2 thank you cards left to write: one for my mother and one for Florence. John has about 4 left to do. I finally got the letter to my father-in-law written “right”– after 6+ months and 2 drafts. Also, I owe a letter to ; I haven’t forgotten– it’s one of those “gee, I have to find the right words” kinds of things– like the one for my father-in-law.
My “holiday card” strategy this year consisted of:
Sending a card with any gift certificates or gifts.
Sending a holiday postcard to everyone from , if they were in the U.S. (sorry– I just couldn’t do the postage for the UK this time.)
Sending a holiday card as a Thank You card in return to anyone who sent us gifts or holiday cards (unless they were a person who already got a card).
My holiday postcards were little generic winter scenes. My holiday TY cards have penguins on them.
For Valentine’s Day, I’ll try to hit on the International Beauties of .
Should I mention that my dad didn’t send a card or call for Christmas? Nah…..
Oh, and it’s 3:30, and I would like to go home and pack, plsthx. I’m going to Las Vegas tomorrow!
asked about my whitelist/blacklist spam filtering setup, so I thought I’d let you all know how I manage the 500+ pieces of spam I receive each day.
I’ve gone to a Virtual Receptionist program that my web host provides. The program is called “Box Guard” and it appears to be written by iSparks, Inc. (ironic, since iSparks seems to have a rep for spamming on the Internet). It resides on the server-side of the transaction, so if you don’t have this option on your web host, you’ll want to go with one of the other options.
Basically, when an email comes in for me, it automatically bounces back a message to the sender. That message is below:
—————
Hi!
In order to eliminate spam from my inbox, I’m using a “Virtual
Receptionist” to handle my incoming email.
Your email message with the subject of:
“[ORIGINALSUBJECT]”
has NOT been delivered to me because my Virtual Receptionist
does not recognize your email address.
Can you please confirm that you are a REAL person (and NOT a
spammer) by sending a blank message to the following address?
[REPLYADDRESS]
Or, even easier, just reply to this message. Once you do this, your
original message will be released for delivery, and your email
address will be added to my whitelist. You won’t have to do anything
else, and future email messages will be delivered to me as well.
Please note that I will not see anything you write in response
to this message, as it will be seen by my Virtual Receptionist
only. So now’s your chance to tell me what you *really* think!
Thanks! I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Stephanie Bryant (aka mortaine)
— A copy of your original message is below:
[ORIGINALMESSAGE]
———-
About 99% of the time, spammers don’t reply to this message. A few days later, the pending message is deleted from my system.
It’s been suggested that I include an anti-spam contract in the message: “If you are an unsolicited advertiser or are sending me a commercial message that I did not specifically request or opt-in for and you reply to this message to get on my whitelist, you will be violating anti-spam laws in California and the United States. You agree that, should you do this, that you will pay a sum of $450 to me in damages for wasting my time, inconveniencing me, and/or for sending me offensive or harassing messages.” So far, this hasn’t been necessary, and I hesitate to do it because of the legitimate business contacts, particularly from eBay and Half.com, who might be offended and go away as a result.
The one flaw is that there are sometimes people who do not reply to the message, and whose email then gets lost in the ether. I have a little sympathy, so I’ve started warning people, particularly if I email them “out of the blue,” that their email may bounce back because of my aggressive spam blocker. I’m planning to put a warning into my sig file as well, so people will know what to expect if they’re not whitelisted already. Also, any automated messages (like order and delivery confirmations from online shopping sites) won’t get through.
For those cases, my spam receptionist has a “Pending Messages” list where I can go and approve or delete any messages as needed. This lets me approve messages that are legitimate while ignoring or deleting ones that are spam. If I approve a message (by selecting the checkmark), it automatically adds that sender to the whitelist. If I delete a message, it does not add them to the blocked senders list.
Note one design flaw which I hope they fix sometime: there is no way to check all the messages on the page and mass-delete or mass-approve. Each time you approve or delete a message, you are taken to a second screen that makes you wait 5 seconds while it refreshes. This is annoying and means that deleting unwanted spam is a tedious process. You’ll also note that I have 37 pages of spam– my pending filter is usually 42-50 pages long. I’ve never gone all the way to the end of it, so I don’t know how many days back it goes– probably 3 or 5.
In case you’re wondering, I have 253 email addresses on my whitelist. Of these, 36 of them are global– anyone from those domains can send me email and I’ll receive it (to cover things like LiveJournal and Plogs, as well as domains that I trust, like my own domains and those of close friends). Whenever a spammer adds themselves to my whitelist by replying to my message, I promptly add them to my ignore list; they think their message is being received by me, but it’s not.
The other thing I used for managing spam is a program called SpamAssassin, which I found thanks to . I had it running under Linux as a daemon; it’s also available as a Windows plug-in for some email programs. Since I no longer receive more than 1 spam a week, I no longer need this program on my computer. However, it’s a very good little program that calculates a message’s spam score using key phrases, header information (like faked headers), and the like. You can add or edit the spam rules, and you can set the spam filter higher or lower, depending on how often you get spam. In my case, I had it set very low– I think a message needed a spam score of about 1.2 to be flagged. I set up a filter in my email program (KMail) to filter anything with “[SPAM]” in the Subject line– the flag I had configured Spamassassin to use. If a message was incorrectly flagged, I would add the sender to my “whitelist,” a custom list of addresses that were “OK” to receive mail from. Adding senders wasn’t a one-click process, though– I had to manually edit the text file of my preferences, which was in a hidden directory in my user directory.
After a while, only 2-3 messages a week were being accidentally filtered out. And the amount of spam I actually had to look at went down to 1-2 messages a day. However, there was a bottleneck in checking for spam. Because I had spamassassin installed on my local machine and not on the server itself, all my email, including the spam, had to download onto my computer and get processed by spamassassin to be flagged as spam in KMail. Since I had KMail set up to delete messages after downloading and I wanted to be able to check email while at work, I would shut it down during the workday and then restart it after I got home. If I made the mistake of leaving KMail off overnight, it would take an hour or more to download the 300 or so spam messages that had accumulated overnight. During that hour, my computer would run very slowly, despite being a dual-processor server. I have only about an hour in the morning to spend, on email and on my other tasks, and I resented having to download any spam at all– it’s a waste of time and bandwidth, and servers are really well designed for this kind of gatekeeping task.
Now, one thing that wanted to know is if you could use blacklists with an email filtering program. Of course– Spamassassin can be configured for whitelists and blacklists both. And the Virtual Receptionist program I use now can automatically handle any individual person as a blacklist– I can ignore messages from blocked senders, or I can even set up a server-side mail filter to bounce messages from particular senders– so they might think my email address is no longer valid.
The programs I have set up are very specialized and very specific to the tasks I needed to get done, but most of what they do can be done using any standard email program’s filters. You won’t get Spamassassin’s rules filtering, but if you don’t mind the bandwidth traffic, you can set up a bouncer filter. It would look something like this:
IF Recipient = THEN Send Message: [template]
The subject of the template should say “RECEPTIONIST:” and any message with “RECEPTIONIST” in the subject line goes into your Inbox. All other mail gets filtered to a “Possible spam” box:
IF Subject != RECEPTIONIST THEN Move Message: MaybeSpam
Note: For those who aren’t familiar, “!” means “is not” in programming terms– your mail program’s filter will probably say “is not” in English, but this is the “logic” behind the program you’re creating with your filters.
When you receive a “RECEPTIONIST” message, create a filter whitelisting that user. Often, there will be a shortcut for this, like “Make Filter” or “Create Rule.” Basically, you’ll create a filter that says:
IF Sender = THEN Move Message: InBox
In most email programs, the order that things get filtered is important, so the whitelist filters should be first, before the RECEPTIONIST filters.
You can then set up a blacklist for anyone you don’t like, or anyone who sends you a lot of spam:
IF Sender = THEN Move Message: Trash
Oh, and for those of you addicted to LiveJournal, you’ll want these two filters to be top on your list:
IF Sender = THEN Move Message: InBox
IF Sender = THEN Move Message: InBox
The first one gets your comment notifications into your Inbox. The second one gets important information, like validation and password reminders, into your Inbox. And if you have a paid account, you can do this one:
IF Recipient = THEN Move Message: InBox
But you’ll want to be sure to mangle your email address (free users can mangle or hide their email address too) before you set that option.
Given the success of the more aggressive Virtual Receptionist, I should probably change my displayed name, huh?
