So head on over to The OS Quest for future updates. This week we have:

Security Quest 1a: Recent Security News and Getting Caught Up

Security Quest 1b: Microsoft Patch Tuesday info

I’m doing the update in phases and tonight it was updates to the theme and plugins used. The next phase means updating many of the old posts as I implement tagging. Those of you who get the feeds may see many old posts being marked as new or updated. There won’t be any new content, I’ll just be adding tags and tweaking the formatting for the new design. Speaking of the feed, feel free to subscribe using your favorite reader.

The design isn’t mine as I used an existing free theme (no link or name yet, I want to be able to do it justice and make sure my implementation doesn’t give it a black eye.) but let me know what you think of the design and provide any suggestions.

The upgrade seems to have screwed up which widgets are used on the sidebar. I’ve actually removed all widgets from the configuration so they might go away and the default sidebars will return. In any case, I’m planning a major site redesign from now until the weekend which will make the problem moot. [Update: The problem is unique to this theme - tiga 1.02 - which is listed as non-compatible so the problem should be resolved by the weekend when I change themes.]

Since I want to be at WordPress 2.2 for the upgrade I’m leaving things they way they are. Apologies for the slightly bizarre sidebars. [Updated 6/1 - with the theme update ths problem no longer exists]

So, we’re still moving in but you can check out the About page to see what anti-spam measures are in place on this site and feel free to look around.

I also run The OS Quest website and there’s a Spam Project page on the site that will have summary information from the project. But it’s here in The Spam Chronicles will have all the information and have it first.

Here are the resources available to me which is what I’ll be looking at to start with.

Pobox.com

I’ve been using Pobox.com (www.pobox.com) as an e-mail forwarder since 1998. And I’ve used one of the three addresses it provides for the entire time. So I get lots of spam at these addresses, in the last 24 hours their spam filter has flagged (and held) 59 e-mails as Spam and they’ve flagged 1,099 e-mails in the last 30 days.

My account allows me to set up three incoming addresses and it will forward mail to up to 5 addresses. The plan is to use the forwarding feature to send the same spam to various e-mail accounts to see how their filters work. The forwarding addresses can be changed as needed which will allow me to set up various comparisons as needed. To further allow spam analysis without causing problems they allow mail to be released without whitelisting or otherwise affecting the filter. The setting is “Do not whitelist the address. I release many of my messages for review or spam tuning.” which is exactly what I want.

They also have various options which can be used to configure their spam filter although to date I haven’t changed from their defaults. I’ll be looking at those settings and their recommendations later on in the project.

Yahoo Mail

Of my current e-mail accounts, I’ve had the Yahoo mail address the longest. It’s also my primary personal mailbox. I’ve never actually given out the address, instead I give out the pobox addresses and forward them to my Yahoo mailbox.

I’ve never liked that the e-mail address was my user name and couldn’t be changed. Back when I had Comcast I found that I got the most spam at my Comcast e-mail address which was also my user name. At one point I had planned to delete one of my pobox addresses because I thought it was the source of much of my spam (it was the address I used freely and had the longest). When I checked I instead found I was getting more Spam at my Comcast address than all the pobox addresses combined.

Yahoo gets spam that slips through the Pobox filters and spam that it collects on it’s own. The spam filter can be turned off if I want to do client testing, letting all e-mail through. I can also hold and release spam to do more controlled testing. While releasing spam will affect the spam filter, there is a reset option. Yahoo’s spam filter has caught 61 messages in the last two weeks.

GMail (Google Mail)

I’ve had a GMail address for awhile. I’ve used it occasionally on websites or forums. It’s flagged 124 e-mails as spam in the last 30 days but has been as high as 200 at times. While GMail will forward e-mail it doesn’t allow me to disable the spam filter or release the spam mail. (Actually I can mark it not spam, not sure what this would do to my spam filter though.) It does appear that I can mass release spam e-mail by moving it to the inbox without affecting the filter. From what I’ve read in some forums and their online help they seem to have some hard and fast filter rules (which they tune as needed) but the only way to avoid the filter is to add an address to your address book. If a sender is in your address book their e-mail won’t be marked as Spam.

AOL Mail

I recently signed up for AOL’s “my eAddress”. In addition to testing how it attracts and detects spam I have the ability to add/delete addresses. Since these will be new addresses they won’t have attracted spam on their own. I can release spam (from pobox) to newly created addresses and be assured each address receives only that spam. This will prove useful when testing the spam filter in e-mail clients by allowing the same test e-mails as the source.

E-Mail Clients

I’ll be looking at the following PC e-mail clients.

• Mozilla Thunderbird on a Mac
• Apple Mail on a Mac
• Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows XP
• Microsoft Outlook Express on Windows XP

Web Address Books

It seems all mail has a web interface these days and they all have online address books. I’ve always wondered how secure they are. Seems to me if you want e-mail addresses they’re a good place to start. I’ll try seeding a couple addresses books with unique addresses and see if they collect some spam.