I haven’t done much (OK, I haven’t done anything) for almost a month. Some of this is because Spam has been out of my mind. I’ve migrated off of my e-mail addresses that get all my spam and run those e-mails through both the Pobox.com and GMail filters before they hit my inbox. The bottom line was no spam hit my desktop.
The numbers:
- Since December 23rd I’ve received 1,740 Spam e-mails that were stopped by the Pobox.com spam filters.
- Pobox.com stopped three e-mails that I released. These released e-mails were all bulk e-mails and I released them si I could unsubscribe, technically they weren’t spam. Pobox.com no longer receives “real” e-mails for me other than long forgotten mailing lists, so this isn’t an accurate measurement of how well it avoids false positives. I have Pobox.com set to use “Standard Settings” for the spam filter and I allow it to automatically update my anti spam actions which are the defaults.
- GMail stopped an additional 4 spam e-mails that Pobox.com let through.
- GMail stopped 100 spam e-mails that were sent directly to it (not the Pobox forwarded e-mails).
- GMail didn’t have many opportunities for false positives when identifying Spam. It only had problems when dealing with my Pobox.com discard reports. It let about 1/2 of the discard reports through while identifying the others as spam. The inconsistency seems to be due to the specific server that GMail got the message from as the sending server for the ones flagged as spam was different than the ones for messages that got through. (The sending address is not in my contact list which would probably avoid the whole issue.)
- On the Apple Mail Client side 5 e-mails that got through were incorrectly flagged as junk (spam). All were from bulk e-mailers and none were in my address book or previous recipients list.
- My daily count hit a low of 36 on Jan 2nd, but it picked right up and my daily high was 92 on Jan 9th. (Those highs/lows are since Dec 23rd.
That’s all for now, just a quick update to the numbers.