Don't Back Down

No, not that kind. The annoying junk email kind. It seems that wherever I turn lately, there's a report on the overwhelming amount of spam we're receiving. We've all got it. But how do we deal with it? That depends. It depends on whether you are a single user or if you are responsible for (or one of) multiple users.

On a personal basis, I've been using disposable email addresses. These allow you to create custom addresses, perhaps including the name of the site you are sending your email to, so that you can track your spam. My current favorite is spamgourmet.com. You set up a forwarding address, then create an unlimited number of addresses, each of which can have trusted senders and a cap on how many emails are forwarded to you. After the number in each address is exhausted, you don't receive any more mail from that address. Easy (and free)!

Another site, mailinator.com, takes things a step further. Rather than the hassle of numbers and forwarding addresses, you just give out an address @mailinator.com. Check the site if you want to see if you've received anything. All emails are deleted after "a few hours". Great for handing out your address to unknown entities, but you probably wouldn't want to use this as a permanent address, or for sensitive emails! Also free.

Tony Sumrall told me about mailami.com, a web email service that aggressively attacks spam through the use of allow (white) and block (black) lists. They offer a free trial, which may or may not expire - you'll need to check this one for more details, as I haven't used it.

Another webmail provider, mailblocks.com, makes use of both the disposable address concept and challenge-response technology to make sure a human is on the other end. This is a pay service, but their current deal appears to be $9.95 for three years, so it's not an expensive solution.

One other program I ran across sits between your mail server and your mail client. Mailwasher appears to have a pretty extensive array of features, including the ability to "bounce-back" messages so it appears that your email address is no longer valid. Also free.

These are great, but don't help much if you're running a mail server.

Mark Fletcher, who brought us Bloglines, offers a community-based DNS blacklist service called Trustic. There are other DNS blacklist services, but none that I know of employ the community concept used here by Mark. With Mark's experience from Onelist and Bloglines, it seems he has the community thing down and could be the one to watch in this space. One current disadvantage: The service won't work natively with Microsoft Exchange 5.5.

Recently at work, we've started using Mail Essentials by GFI. Mail Essentials works only under Windows, as it uses the IIS SMTP engine to act as a gateway to your email server. Because of this, you can be using most anything as an email server (including Exchange 5.5) - you only need the Windows IIS installation to sit between your server and the outside world. Mail Essentials offers black- and white-list features, DNS-based blocklist functionality and even content scanning and disclaimer insertion. With it, we've blocked more than 1200 emails in the last 5 days. There is a trial version, and after the trial period ends, only some of the features will continue to work. You'll need to purchase a license to use all of the features once the trial expires.