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© 2001 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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If you own your own domain, as we do here at altman.com, then you know the situation all too well…
Be your own boss…achieve unimaginable wealth…investigate anyone…reduce your credit card debt…capture the attention of millionaires…get an international driver’s license…and of course, increase the size of your, um, your—well, just about anything.
Everyone must put up with spam today, and most tolerate it with equal parts exasperation and amusement. But when you own a domain and publish a Web site, when you have valid e-mail addresses in the HTML code of your pages, as consumer-conscious Web sites must, then you open yourself up to a flood of unsolicited e-mail of unimaginable proportion. My mother complains of “at least one a day” delivered to her AOL account. We suffer through about 300 a day.
The patterns are predictable. From 9am until 3pm out here on the West Coast, the spam train chugs relatively slowly—only about five to seven per hour. But by mid-afternoon, after hours on the East Coast, the amount doubles. By midnight, the ratio of spam to real mail is about 10 to 1. On weekends…well, you don’t really want to go there.
Microsoft Outlook’s Rules Wizard—with which you can target and delete specific spammers—is no match for this onslaught. When an invitation to lose up to 14 inches of fat comes from 20 different e-mail addresses, there’s not much that the Rules Wizard can do. And even when it does work, the result is an overloading of your Deleted Items folder—you still have to take out the trash.
The spam infiltration had gotten so bad, the only thing to equate it to is to be pounded into submission. Sort of like being killed by ants—after awhile, there are so many of them, swatting them away does nothing, and the simplest thing to do is just let them crawl all over you and gradually devour you.
We felt as if we were being devoured by spam.
And then we were saved. CorelWORLD presenter Bill Blinn was the one to come to our aid: He told us about SpamKiller. The invasion of the ants is over.
SpamKiller is $29.95 shareware from a company called Novasoft. It is worth 10 times that amount. This program earns its mark of distinction because it checks for and removes spam before it gets to your inbox. It logs on to the POP server at your ISP or LAN and inspects your unread mail. It reads the sender name, recipient, message header, subject, and the body of each letter, checking against a vast database of known spammer addresses and common phrases.
When it finds spam, you determine the action that SpamKiller takes:
After SpamKiller does its thing, it opens your e-mail client so you can check the mail that remains. While a few make it under the radar, our spam quotient is down by 95%. Hallelujah!
Of the actions outlined above, we choose mostly Option 3: Kill and send error message. This is not like replying and asking “Please take us off your list, pretty please?” That’s the worst thing you can do—it tells the spammer that yours is a valid e-mail address. But the error message looks just like the one you would get if you sent e-mail to a bad address. Those spammers who actually care will then remove your address from their list.
SpamKiller lets you see all spam that has been killed, just in case it accidentally deletes legitimate mail. That happens to us about once per week, so we periodically check the trash to make sure it all really is trash. This takes less than 15 seconds—about one 20th the time it takes to excise it from our inbox one by one.
The program gets smarter as you use it, because you can add additional filters for the few spam that survive. Also, you can create exceptions to insure against legitimate mail getting mistakenly deleted.
SpamKiller has saved our on-line lives—we don’t quite know what we would do without it. If you are getting fed up with spam, don’t wait for Washington to enact laws that will be doomed to failure before they even begin. Take matters into your own hands. Get SpamKiller.
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Copyright 2001, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in...
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