Aside from the infamous Monty Python skit, have you ever met anyone that actually likes spam? Not me. I’ve looked forward to ditching my spammed-out e-mail account for ages. Switching from my old e-mail address (which I’ve had since the dotcom boom) to a new address has allowed me to significantly cut down on the amount of spam in my mailbox.

It’s a liberating experience to leave all that spam behind, lemmetellya.

There’s still a good bit of spam finding its way through, however, so I’m in search of a good spam filter solution. While I want to install a spam filter to work with my e-mail program, Eudora, I’m presently trying out MailWasher to stop spam before it’s downloaded from my mailserver. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with MailWasher, but for now, it’s helping me to more easily manage the flow of spam.

There’s one potentially nasty part of MailWasher, however …

Out of the box, MailWasher appears to be setup to generate bounce messages. Folks tell me that’s not a good thing to do … especially when those bounce messages land in the mailboxes of the unsuspecting … as happens when the return address has been forged. So while I’ve been using MailWasher with some success, I have it set up to forego the bounce option.

Once things settle down, I’m going to take a look getting Eudora to do a better job of filtering out the spam, perhaps with the aid of Spamnix or another solution.

Speaking of spam …

Are you by chance in search of the perfect gift for someone who hates spam?

Look no further than the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy’s (ISIPP) Slam a Spammer Store! You’ll find a whole bunch of fun stuff, including those sassy “Make Love, Not Spam” boxer shorts and camisole tops, super-caffeinated “Make Coffee, Not Spam” coffee mugs and coasters, and my personal favorite, the “Slam a Spammer” t-shirt.

The ISIPP provides information and consulting about spam, e-mail, and Internet issues, and is the sponsor of the national Spam and the Law conference. Their new ISIPP Accreditation Database (IADB) is intended to allow the e-mail that’s supposed to get through get delivered without getting caught in overzealous spam filters.

“What is unique about IADB, among other things, is that it is the first DNS-queryable database which provides the kind of fact-based data that it does,” explains ISIPP President and CEO, Anne Mitchell. “We don’t tell ISPs “you should accept e-mail from this sender because we say so” We tell ISPs “this organization has good mailing practices, they are known to us, they publish SPF records, participate in Bonded Sender, or whatever the case may be, and the ISPs and other receivers make their e-mail acceptance or rejection decisions based on that data.”

Makes good sense to me. I’m all for the legitimate mail making its way through … while the spam gets caught in the filters …