Spam Unlimited

Spam is certainly no Ham. That's for sure.

Been busy waging a war on Spam in my Outlook 2002 these past two weeks. It's really getting on my nerves. I get about averagely 10 spam mails per day - sometimes even more. Ugh! How frustrating.

It was really irritating, plus it is a pure waste of time to manually weed these junks out from my Inbox everyday and trying hard to avoid clicking any of it open accidentally as it may carry some malicious wares such as viruses or other dangerous hidden programs. Better be safe than to be sorry ya.

What’s more frustrating is that, filtering them out proven to be &^%$#@ freaking tedious and hopeless especially if you are using Outlook 2002 and not any other higher versions such as Outlook 2003 which comes with a better filter (more features, better flexibility and easier to configure plus, most importantly…. It’s updateable unlike its predecessor).

Spammers are getting more and more cunning nowadays – their spam contains not only text BUT, also contains html or cleverly displayed as picture/image. And these tricks helps it to bypass the normal or an ordinary Junk-mail filter.

Adding these Junk-mail’s sender addresses to the Junk-Mail Sender List would be a total waste of time – I will tell you why…. It’s because these Spammers had a way to create new email accounts for each of its spam. Therefore you may be receiving the same spam content but, it would be from different email addresses each time – So, does this not make adding them into the Junk-Mail Sender List null and void??

What am I supposed to do now?..... Since the normal kind of built-in filtering is not working as effective as I wanted it to be. Am I supposed to just ignore them as what my company’s IT personnel advised?.... Ha! Fat chance that is. LOL - Wage a war I will, and a victorious war it shall be..... Muahhahhahahaha….. Spam beware. Vengeance is my middle name *evil grin*.

The Solutions……

After countless hours of hardcore digging thru the net and some IT magazines and also not to mention, after numerous test runs.... Eureka! two fine and dandy solutions was uprooted at last.

One is by using external help in the form of a third party Outlook Addin called SpamBayes Outlook Addin 1.0.4 and the second option, would be turning back to Outlook 2002 filter for help - But do not fear, for I have somehow managed to fine tune (or customise) a filtering rule to near perfection... ahem..(to me at least :D). I shall only elaborate on this internal filter next week or so. Cos’ time does not permit me to go into the details today. Sorry.

SpamBayes Outlook Addin
Just download it from the net – it’s free and it’s good plus, it’s damn easy to configure :)

Basically, you just need to teach it like a child to differentiate between what is good food and what is junk food and which one to steer clear off. And this awesome piece of software is called a Bayesian filter.

To sum things off….

All in all, I have gain more that I lose in this War I have waged against the Evil Spam. Gained more knowledge about Spam and Outlook filtering how-tos. Gained tons of confidence *silly grin* and self-worth too. Ahha….

So, until later then…. Ta...ta...