Email load balancing
I use pobox.com for my email address. pobox runs a forwarding service
-> for about $20/yr they will forward any email they receive to a
number of different accounts. I signed up for it because I was tired of
notifying everyone in my address book when my ISP went belly up, got
acquired, rebranded etc. I've always had two email accounts registered
with pobox -> one free webmail account and then my ISP. That way, I
essentially load balance my email. If one provider goes down, the odds
of the other one being down at the same time are vanishingly small. And
what about my single point of failure, pobox? Their building was
flooded once, and had to be evacuated for a weekend. Mail just queued
up and was sent out a day late. That's one day of interruption in about
5 years.
Having the same mail feed go to different place allows me to compare
spam fighting techniques. For instance, my old computer runs
Outlook/Cloudmark, my new computer runs MozillaMail/Bayesian Spam
Filtering, and fastmail runs SpamAssassin. pobox will tag likely
spam, but I'm not sure what they're using. It's quite a gauntlet. I
really like Cloudmark's ease of use, and collaborative filtering's
small likelihood of mis-tagging email that's just for you.
MozillaMail's anti-spam is up there, but it's only been a couple of
weeks since it's had the capability to move tagged mail to a different
folder (hooray!). It's young but promising. It's hard to tell how good
SpamAssassin works, because it's server configuration is not something
tailored to me... it has to work for all the fastmail users, and let's
just say the way it's configured bad stuff gets through. Looking on
the bright side, it means I didn't waste my time training my Bayesian
filter.
one more spam thought
When will someone implement a pronouncability metric, to catch
Bayesian-avoiding 'sddfjshjherew' subject lines? Does one of the many
SpamAssassin heuristics not look for this already?
.
12:33:16 AM 
|
|
