Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
I've been running my own Exchange Server since before forever (started at 4.0, for goodness sakes, when it was useless!) I've also had the exact same email address since 1992 or 1993, and it's been published in myriad books over the years. The ONE thing that saves me from a mailbox full of CRAP is ExchangeDefender. Is it perfect? No, I need to check the quarantine about once a week or so, just to make sure I didn't miss something. But it gets 100% of what it decides is "SureSpam" and sends it to /dev/null, and then the stuff it mostly thinks is spam, but not absolutely sure, it puts in quarantine. (That's all configurable, of course.) The stuff that gets eaten is thousands of messages a week. The number of clearly spam that get through? Probably 5-6 a day, almost all then caught by Outlook, given how I have Outlook set. And about 2-4 a month of "real" messages get put into ExchangeDefender quarantine. Less as you teach it.
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Yeah, that's a server side product. Spambayes can be run on a server too, and various folks do, but it's not the usual choice.
One thing I rapidly appreciated about Gmail was the best spam filtering I'd seen. It uses Bayesian filtering too, but the spam characteristics database is composed from the Report Spam clicks of millions of Gmail users. Perhaps one new spam message every two weeks makes it into my Inbox. Report Spam, and I don't see it
again. The rest gets labeled Spam, and if I don't manually clean it out, gets automatically deleted after 30 days. Gmail gets the occasional false positive, but it's a moment and a click to reclassify it. (Ironically, one source of false positives a while back was mail sent to the SpamBayes mailing list...
)
At this point, I simply don't
care about spam.
Another nice side effect was security. My mail resides on Google's servers, and I read it in my browser. Attachments reside there too, and Gmail had viewers for all common attachment types, so I don't need to download them, either.
Email is the primary vector by which viruses are spread, but possibly malicious mail never reaches my machine (and is likely quarantined as spam in any case.) On the XP machine, I was running Symantec Corporate A/V on an employer site license. The version I was running reached EOL and would no longer get virus signature updates. I no longer worked for that employer, and a new version would be on my dime. The only things it had ever "caught" had been false positives. I thought about it and decided
not to replace it. I haven't missed it. (On the desktop running Win7 Pro I use Microsoft Security Essentials, but wouldn't miss
it, either.)
If I ran my own mail server and used Exchange, I'd likely use ExchangeDefender or the like, but since no spam filter is perfect, I'd run SpamBayes in Outlook to catch what it missed.
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Dennis