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# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/16/2004 11:32 AM Michael Kennedy

Hi Scott,

Just leave your computer online with Outlook running. Then set your account to delete the email 3 days after downloading it or something like that if you have "leave on server" marked. As long as you have it set to automatically do a send and receive every so often it should work fine.

My 2 cents.

Regards,
Michael

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/16/2004 11:51 AM Jenny

For myself, I don't use my ISP for email because of their laxity regarding spam. So, I use my web hosting account, which has SpamAssassin installed by default. I simply blackhole the email that SpamAssassin marks as spam, so I never have to download it in the first place. Of course, SpamAssassin is not a perfect solution -- I still get spam that's not marked as such, but it's maybe 5 a day. Without SpamAssassin I was getting about 100+ spams a day.

I don't know if your host uses anti-spam measures on your server, but if they do, perhaps you could temporarily redirect your ISP email address to an address on your hosting account? Just a thought...

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/17/2004 11:14 AM Jeffrey Sullivan

This is OT, but Congratulations on getting married!

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/17/2004 7:14 PM Jeff Key

One word (uh, URL), my friend: www.spamarrest.com. I've been using this thing for 3/4 of a year now and I couldn't live without it. It's challenge-response and just wonderful.

It works as a middleman: It downloads email from your POP3 account and you download mail from it. The great thing, of course, is that you only get stuff from email addresses of people that have verified their address, ie. no spammers. (I believe you can upload your address book to populate the white list.) It's processed 26,662 messages for me and I think only one spammer has actually verified and gotten a spam through. No problem, though: you can blacklist addresses so they can't even be verified.

Since it downloads every n minutes (user-settable, IIRC) you won't get a full box. Beautiful!

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/17/2004 10:27 PM Scott Mitchell

Jeff, I created my own C/R spam blocker a year ago or so, but gave up on it for a number of reasons. You can read more about it at:
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/SpamBlocker.html

I use SpamBayes now, and am quite happy with it, but the downside is that it runs on my computer, meaning I need to download the emails, blah blah blah.

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/18/2004 1:25 PM Russ Nemhauser

Howdy Scott,

I'd have to agree with the "leave Outlook running" idea and have daily scheduled downloads of your mail. Computers don't draw THAT much current, and you wouldn't need to have your monitor on.

Is there a specific reason you DON'T want to leave the computer on while you're gone?

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/18/2004 1:31 PM Scott Mitchell

Russ, my main reason for not wanting to leave my computer on is that it just seems silly. It's like saying, "Ok, spammers, you win." Plus it just feels like a very low-tech solution to a problem that shouldn't, really, be that hard.

# re: Problems syndicating some feeds lately 6/29/2004 5:46 AM Luciano Evaristo Guerche

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 6/29/2004 11:31 PM Mike Schinkel

>> leave the computer on...

Then you just gotta hopes the power doesn't go out longer than your ups can handle... :)

# re: Managing Spam When On Vacation 7/12/2004 3:17 PM drew

I have been using SpamNet for 3 months now, and it is very very good. under $4 a month, over a million antispammers, and over 4000 spam messages that i have not had to touch. I don't care for the challenge/response model, and this suits me well.

Simply put, if a spam reaches you, you simply block it with SpamNets tool, it then updates a db so that over a million others **do not have to block the email**. One of my providers is working with them to bring this to a server level.

www.Cloudmark.com is the home of spamnet and if you wanted to refer back to me (helps us reduce our cost).. you can use http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=ktmtaa

I hope this helps, i saved my sanity!

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