All hail SpamArrest
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I’ve had a serious problem for many years, one that I’ve been reluctant to talk about. See, I do a lot of writing in lots of different places. I publish articles, tutorials, and how-to’s in all kinds of online zines, developer portals, and other places. At the end of each article is a little bio about me, complete with email address.
To make a long story short, the spam harvester bots love me. Over the course of five years in business, there’s been ample opportunity for me to be spammed to death. In fact, at last count, I receive approximately 10,000 pieces of email in any given 90 day period.
I tried everything to back this flood up. I changed my email address a few times. I abandoned other email addresses that I’ve had for too many years to count. I added MailFrontier to Outlook, but it never played nice enough to work that well. Besides, dollar for dollar, it didn’t perform that much better than the Junk Email filters on Outlook–which is to say, every day I’d still get 30 to 40 new SPAMs it didn’t know how to detect.
So finally I was at the brink of despair and I decided to use SpamArrest. A friend of mine had started using it and recommended it highly. Here’s how it works:
You tell SpamArrest which mailboxes to protect. You give it usernames and passwords and it will go fetch email from all your email inboxes, wherever they may be. Any new person that isn’t in SpamArrest’s database of “okay” users gets a challenge email. Once a user answers the challenge, they’ll be allowed to email you as a legitimate user.
Why does this work? Because 99% of mail is sent out by spambots that can’t answer the challenge.
It’s the best $5/month that I’m ever going to spend in my life!
In the past week, it’s processed 1500 emails, 33 of which were legitimate. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Now I can concentrate on the real work instead of deleting 20 junk emails every time I come back from a meeting.
