I hit breaking point yesterday when I realized that I’d gotten 2668 spam in about three weeks. The main culprit is my old computer.org email address, which I’ve had since ‘95 or so, and the IEEE spam filters are ineffective.

My phfactor.net address is also discovered, leading to much annoyance. Lately its been stock pump-and-dump scams, delivered as images. The Apple mail.app filtering is excellent, but can’t deal with image-delived spam.

So yesterday I signed up for Spamcop:

They run a clean setup - you forward your email to them, and they have POP/IMAP/WWW access to it. Costs $30 per year, with discounts for multiple addresses. So far it’s been 100% effective, even catching the image spam. If you look at the headers, you can see they run Qmail (Hi Dan!).

Anyway. I’ve updated all my old addresses to use this now (IEEE, Computer.org, fnal.gov, anl.gov, mcs.anl.gov, phfactor.net) so we’ll see how it works. If it remains effective, it’ll totally be worth every penny.