My GMail spam count held steady from last week and stayed at 392 spam emails stopped in the last 30 days.

Comment spam at The OS Quest exploded and closed in at 1,000 but stopped at 976. With a 98% increase in just a week It came close to receiving nearly as much comment spam in the last week as it did since the site was established in November 2006. Trackback spam became a problem and two of them ended up being posted,

Comment Spam to this site jumped 380% with 58 pieces of new comment spam this week to bring the total to 73.

News Summary

A summary of news that didn’t make it into their own posts.

If you use AOL you might want to check your password if it’s over 8 characters. According to the Washington Post AOL allows 16 characters in their account password. But it seems they were only using the first 8 characters and ignoring everything else. The Washington Post article gives the example of someone who thinks they have a good 13 character password except the problem is the first 8 characters are their name. So someone trying to access the account may assume the person used their name and try it. Even though the person tried to make it more secure by making it longer the hacker would get into their account. At least if they said there was an eight character limit people would have known and made their passwords fit the size.

Also in the category of stupid, a big topic this week was the attempt by the AACS to suppress the hex code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD’s. The AACS sent out a bunch of take down notices to sites that had the number posted. One of the sites was Digg.com which complied. Then the Digg community revolted and did nothing but post the number in hundreds of articles. Digg finally gave up and left the articles up. The AACS says they still intend to pursue people who publish the number. They’ve stopped using the number with new DVD’s and as old systems get updated the key will be revoked. The story made the mainstream press, so now everyone knows the number. Plus, there’s news of a new hack available and this one claims to be unpluggable. Since the encryption has to be self-contained on the DVDs it’s going to be crackable given enough time and resources. All it does is cause problems for the consumer who lays out their money while forcing people who pirate as a business work a little harder but still make their money.

As CNet News.come reports, hacker’s continue to target 3rd party apps. In this case a critical security flaw was found in a Photoshop Plug-in.

Site News

There was a problem with the RSS Feed for this site earlier this morning. There weren’t any posts while it was broken and it’s fixed now so you shouldn’t have a problem if you’re subscribed. If you tried a new subscription you got a 404 Not Found error. Kudos to feedburner for noticing the feed was broken and sending me an email (through an optional free service they provide). It took me awhile to sort out since I didn’t think I had changed anything. But I eventually found my .htaccess file was missing. I had copied it to use at another site, so I thought. But I must have moved it instead. A restore from backup and all was well.

Yahoo caught 119 spam messages and let 78 into my inbox for a 60% success rate.

GMail caught 194 spam messages and let 3 through for a 98% success rate.

Both Yahoo and Gmail received 197 spam messages over the 5 days. None of my AOL (“My eAddress”) accounts received anywhere near that number, even when spam filtering was turned off. This would indicate that AOL is doing their own filtering and stopping some email before it ever gets to the inbox. (Unless there were some delivery problems.)

The AOL mailbox with the spam filter set to low received 146 spam emails and let them all through to the inbox. Fifty one messages never made it to the mailbox.

The AOL mailbox with the spam filter set to medium stopped 36 and let 101 through to my inbox while 60 never made it to mailbox.

The AOL mailbox with the spam filter set to high stopped 47 while letting 88 through to the inbox. Sixty-two never made it to the mailbox.

I’ve been moving legitimate email off of the addresses that get my spam. So while there weren’t any false positives (or would that be false negatives?) the fact is I don’t get any legit email at those addresses anymore.

GMail is clearly better than the others at stopping spam. But the question that remains for me is whether it’s so aggressive it will stop legitimate email. Even with the AOL filter set to high it let through more spam than the Yahoo filter did. But but Yahoo and AOL let through so much spam I’d need a good email client to filter out what gets through. So, why have the email provider filter anything? If everything gets to the email client, and it has a good filter, there’s only one place to check for false positives.

I turned the Pobox spam filter back on and I’ll see how it does for the rest of the year.

The only two places spam arrives directly from the internet are at my email forwarder and GMail.

GMail
Gmail (Google Mail) received 18 Spam e-mails over 5 days. There were not any false positives and no spam got through.

Pobox – Mail Forwarder
My mail forwarding service, pobox.com, flagged and held 339 emails as spam over a 5 day period. The only false positives were from one sender. It was an bulk advertising e-mail, but from a place I’d done business with. I could have added the sender to the whitelist, but I chose to unsubscribe instead.

As has been mentioned, ISPs handle email differently when it’s from a forwarder than they do when it’s direct. The three accounts the mail is being forwarded to only receive email from the forwarder. (The .Mac account gets a few e-mails from Apple and the Yahoo account gets a few e-mails from Yahoo.) If my email forwarder didn’t detect a message as spam it passed it along. I had the e-mails sent to my Yahoo, .Mac and AOL (“My eAddress”) accounts.

Yahoo
I reset the junk filter when I started. As I checked the mail each day I used Yahoo’s junk mail button to properly mark the e-mail and train the filter. Only e-mail not caught by the forwarder was sent to Yahoo.

The first day Yahoo missed 10 out of 11 junk e-mails. But even with just these e-mails as training it started catching more than it missed from that point on. During the 5 day period Yahoo caught 19 junk emails and let 17 through.

There was one false positive which was a marketing e-mail which I added to my address book for future delivery.

There was another marketing email where the exact same email was sent to two of my email addresses. Yahoo saw one as junk but not the other. I’m guessing it was the second one that if flagged as junk rather than an inconsistency.

.MAC Mail
.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user.Typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox. One of the undelivered emails was a daily report I receive. I added the sender address to my address book on my Mac. From that point on these emails were received. I do sync my address book with .Mac.

AOL (My eAddress)
Over the 5 day period AOL flagged 21 emails as junk and let 31 go through. The first day is the only time it caught more than it let through. It performed worse as it was trained. There weren’t any false positives. AOL seems to be applying its own filter before delivering the mail as the number of emails received in my AOL box was less than the number delivered to Yahoo.

Apple Mail
I used Apple mail to read mail delivered to my .Mac account. The first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.

Apple mail also flagged 5 emails as junk which were not. Not all of these were bulk emails. Two were transaction receipts or info requests sent directly to me. But it’s almost a given that they were sent using an automated system that handles a large volume.

As a test, after delivery of the mail from .Mac mail I downloaded mail from Yahoo. This would duplicate the mail received from .Mac mail. Mail that had been marked as junk or not junk when received from .Mac mail was properly processed.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird had the slowest junk mail filter to train. It also requires marking both junk and non-junk mail to train it. As a small, unscientific test I tried just marking junk for the firs couple of days. The filter made no real improvement despite a large volume of junk. I reset the filter and started marking every email received as either junk or not junk. There was a noticeable improvement right away. The first two days it missed everything, the last two days it caught everything. Thunderbird had 1 false positive which was a bulk email, the same sender that I had to add to my Yahoo address book to let through. For Thunderbird I marked it not junk and added the sender to my “Collected Addresses”.

Thunderbird on Windows handled the junk email the same way it did on Mac. I used the same emails for training.

Outlook Express
I looked at Outlook Express on Windows XP SP2. The only junk mail tool is a blocked address list.

Next Week
Ideally what I want is for all mail to be delivered to my desktop inbox and let it filter for junk mail. This keeps me from having to go to another location to look for blocked email that I actually need.

I turned off the spam filters at my email forwarder and at Yahoo. This week we’ll see how well Thunderbird and Apple Mail handle the spam.