01:30 pm, 17 Sep 03
my mom gets a lot of spam
So my mom gets on the order of 500 spam mails a day. She uses Windows (and she's not gonna switch, though she was lusting after my laptop), gets her mail via POP from random ISPs like concentric.net and ATTBI, and she's willing to pay for software. (Bonus, but possibly unnecessary feature: IMAP. She sometimes reads her mail from multiple locations, but as far as I can tell that means that she sets the "don't delete on server" option at one, which means she has to read her email twice.)
Can anyone recommend good options for her? After writing that summary, I'm thinking that a third-party IMAP+spam-filtering service could be good, but I don't know anything about the reliability of any particular provider. (I suppose this is yet another argument for me to get my own machine colo'd somewhere, but that's another post...)
Can anyone recommend good options for her? After writing that summary, I'm thinking that a third-party IMAP+spam-filtering service could be good, but I don't know anything about the reliability of any particular provider. (I suppose this is yet another argument for me to get my own machine colo'd somewhere, but that's another post...)
zenspider.com
I'd be happy to host your mom. Given that my domain is graphically tattoo'd to my leg, it's not going away anytime soon. I'm very serious about keeping my mail services up and running.I've got spamassassin that I'm very happy with. I have both POP and IMAP available.
Re: zenspider.com
I should also mention that I keep up to date w/ security probs, have daily incremental backups, weekly fulls, and weekly offsite backups.I'd love love love to do the same thing, truly, but I'm nervous about losing her mail.
I have a box that I've been intending to host at her house, so maybe I could just use that... *hmm*.
I did a similar thing for someone and I was worried the box would break while I was away at uni. Fortunately when it actually did break (quite catastrophically) it did it while I was back from uni for a few weeks, and the hard disk was still alright to pull the mail from.
In general, though, it's probably not a good idea. I replaced the above described with a Windows mail server — namely Mercury Mail from the people who made Pegasus Mail — and it seemed to work alright. It seems to be able to filter quite comprehensively, but I can't comment on exactly how flexible it is since I didn't use this feature.
It hides away in the system tray on 9x or it can be a service on Windows NT. You'd have to make parts of it Internet-accessible to facilitate use remotely, of course. I can't vouch for its trustworthyness.
I've never tried it, but SpamAssassin is known to be effective and it sounds right for your mother's needs.
So if you could get fetchmail running on a server somewhere and have that POP or IMAP into her mail server, giving her a single point of contact that provides spam protection, that might work....
But if you don't run a mail server, that may prove to be a problem.