Before I started travelling around I handled all of my email from Mozilla Thunderbird on my Desktop PC using POP3. Thunderbird’s spam filtering was great at filtering my spam client-side and I was content. But then I sold my PC and started travelling. I quickly switched to using the RoundCube webmail client (I could have used DreamHost’s default SquirrelMail but it’s ugly as hell) but ran out of time to configure SpamAssassin to protect my inbox from the torrent of junk floating through cyberspace. So I traveled the globe, often with little time to check with my email, sometimes weeks apart… and the spam piled up.
Now that I’m settled down in the UK I finally got to tackle the spam problem. I started with a new clean shell account on DreamHost and installed the latest versions of SpamAssassin and its dependencies. I directed all of my email addresses into the new account and moved all of my old emails over too. Finally I installed the latest Thunderbird onto my MacBook (yes I prefer it to OS X Mail) and am now using IMAP so that I can still access my email from anywhere. I’m slowly training SpamAssassin to filter my emails properly, it’s already got things 90% right on a fresh install. This will improve week by week.
I also google’d my email address and removed it from various pages and websites to avoid it being picked up by spiders. On my contact page I’ve used some PHP to generate a unique email address based on the users IP address and the time and date. This should help me keep track of the spam coming in. The only place that I haven’t hidden my email address is my C.V. as I think that’d do more harm then good.
I’ve finally got the upper hand in my battle with spam,