Fighting the spam war

I’ve received some excellent advice in response to my post on spam the other day. Anyone who’s dealing with the same issue ought to check out the comments. I thought I’d provide an update for anyone who’s interested. Perhaps this can help you.

First, I had one problem that was easy to solve. I never use my EarthLink account, so 99.9 percent of the e-mail that comes in is spam. I don’t really care about the other 0.1 percent, since anyone who’s trying to contact me via EarthLink ought to know better. So I turned EarthLink’s Web-based spam-filtering system up to the highest level, and went from receiving dozens of spam e-mails per day to none. Mission accomplished.

The next problem was stickier — what to do about my personal account, dan {at} dankennedy {dot} net, which had become hopelessly bogged down through overuse and careless publication on the Web. The company that provides me with POP service has no server-level spam filtering whatsoever. So I started a Gmail account, and then changed the settings on my POP account so that anything sent to my personal address gets forwarded to Gmail.

Finally I established a new account in Entourage X so that it can download e-mail from my Gmail account. I know that using Gmail on the Web is supposed to be wonderful, but I like Entourage and would just as soon stick with what I’m comfortable with — for the time being, anyway.

Every day or every couple of days I’ll visit the Gmail Web site and sift through the spam folder to see whether there’s anything that shouldn’t have been labeled as spam. I’m just hoping that Gmail’s spam filter is as good as people say it is.

So far, my Northeastern e-mail account, which is listed in the right-hand rail of Media Nation, has not attracted a lot of spam, which I attribute to my being more careful with it. But if it gets out of control, I could presumably do the same thing with that, too.

Thank you, one and all.