President Bush signed the “anti-spam” bill yesterday. I
have it in quotes because it actually makes legal what would
be illegal under tougher state law. For example, I understand
that California has a new law that requires opt-in rather
than, under the federal law, opt-out.
Not waiting for BigGovernment to “solve” the problem, I’ve
been testing two different spam filters (in addition to SpamAssasin
that my host uses). The two are POPFile and K9. Both run on
Windows, although POPFile is Perl-based so it could run on
any platform that executes Perl. By the way, on Windows even
if you don’t have Perl installed the PopFile installer will
install what is needed so it’s fairly easy to get up and
running.
After running a little over 1,000 emails through both
filters I’ve found that POPFile is clearly more accurate.
Right now, POPFile is at 97 percent. That’s 30 errors out of
about 1,000 emails. Two of those 30 were real emails that
ended up in the spam bucket while the others where spam that
made it into the inbox. On the other hand, K9 is at a
relatively low 85 percent (i.e., 150 errors) and very slowly
rising.
Unless you get so many emails that a Perl-based filter
would be too slow, I would recommend PopFile. But whichever
you choose, I think relying on only one spam filter is not
the way to go. Rather, having a layered approach using
different methods to filter the spam seems to be the best
that we can do for now. At least, until enough spammers are
thrown in jail.
