I've finally found my perfect spam counter-attack software
in SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org.uk/). I use Mozilla and
POP3 for email and have had zero luck finding an anti-spam
solution. As much spam comes my way i have been looking.
I like SpamPal because it simple, clever, and it works.
Configuration is simple.
You run a proxy SpamPal POP3 server on your machine. Mozilla is
configured to use the proxy server. SpamPal talks to your
real POP3 mailbox. Filtering is implemented by SpamPal
between your mailbox and the SpamPal server.
The clever twist is that instead of just deleting spam, SpamPal
annotates the subject header with the string **SPAM**. This allows
mozilla's filtering capabilities to delete the email
or send it to a particular folder, which i have cleverly called
spam.
The subject line approach is nice because all spam is not
created equal. A lot of email marked spam is not really spam.
By passing the email through to the reader it's easy to
fine tune SpamPal to reject what you want rejected and
accept what is acceptable. For example, email from yahoo is
marked as spam. Some email from yahoo i really want so i can
add that to the whitelist.
SpamPal is fully configurable through a functional GUI.
Changes in the GUI become active immediately, which is a nice
touch. Email is identified as spam using several spam
identification services. SpamPal won't miss much.
SpamPal also has blacklists and whitelists.
There are also plugins available to provided additional
filtering services. I made use of the RegEx plugin to
automatically whitelist certain email.
I participate in several email lists, some of which were
marked as spam. Email list email usually has an identifying
string like [name] to filter on.
After about 30 minutes of configuration my hit rate is
about 100%. I still browse the spam folder to see if
there are any false positives. If there are i can change
the whitelist or use the regex filter.
Oh, and SpamPal is free.
2:22:01 PM 
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