Spam and (Un)Popularity

I just implemented a new whitelist system for my email that has pretty much eliminated all the spam I was getting into my Inbox and I’ve discovered a weird side-effect. I’m a lot less popular than I once was. I used to keep my home webmail open all the time and every time I’d flip over to that tab in Firefox I’d have a bunch of email to go through. Now that I’ve gotten this whitelist going and only email I specifically allow into my Inbox gets in there, I get a lot less real email than I thought I was getting. Now I can not check my home email but 2 or 3 times a day. The fact that I was seeing tons of email in my Inbox fooled me into thinking I was getting a bunch of real email. Strange but very useful.

It’ll be a geeky post but soon I’ll go over my whitelist setup. It’s not something most people will be able to setup but it’s turned out very well so I want to share it. If you have Postfix with Sieve email filtering going this is a good compromise between getting a million spams and losing real email to a spam filter. Stay tuned for more details and some Perl code. Admit it, you can’t wait!

[tags]email,spam,postfix,sieve,whitelist[/tags]