With all of the bots engaged today, it is war. It is a question of  your sanity versus those who would overload you with so much garbage that you just can’t get through all of it, or it is simply a nuisance that you would rather avoid.

So much has been said about the various ways of filtering spam - I have written a few notes about it myself. Most are effective to some degree, but they do take a while to work well, as a learning mechanism is usually involved.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a filter that worked from the start? No learning curve, and only the mail you want comes through. Well, perfection is an ideal, but Bluebottle comes close.

Bluebottle has accounts from free to lots of dollars per month, depending on the amount of mail you wish to keep, and the attachment size you need to have. It is very easy to set up, and can be set to work with an existing account also.

The mainstay of the system is the challenge-response mechanism that Bluebottle uses. What this means is that any mail that has not already been put on a pre-approved list by you is received, challenged with a notice back to the sending address, and then the system waits for a response. If there is no response, the original mail is trashed at their servers. If, on the other hand, the message is responded to correctly, the original will be delivered. This eliminates the bulk of garbage that drags down most people’s accounts.

The nice thing about it is that you don’t see it at all - there are no notices about how much mail has been trashed, or how swell Bluebottle is for keeping your inbox free of clutter - you simply revert back to the ‘kinder, gentler’ time we all wish for - spam free.

As the commercial for Life cereal used to say - Try it, you’ll like it!

[tags] spam, bots, spam filtration, rejection methodology, challenge-response, Bluebottle.com [/tags]