My subscription to Life expired, but I still have a subscription to Mad.

Monday, July 23, 2007

why I hate e-mail

I get 200 to 250 e-mails per day. I estimate that 20 to 25% of that e-mail is legitimate e-mail, i.e., correspondence with real live people, the output of e-mail lists I subscribe to, and advertisements from companies that I agreed to accept e-mail from. The rest is junk that I wade through in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I actually don't hate e-mail. It is the process of separating the good e-mail from the bad e-mail that I dislike.

I have been using Thunderbird as my e-mail client for about three weeks. It spots about a third of the junk I receive and seldom mislabels good e-mail as junk, but it may be able to do better. I will tweak its spam filtering settings to see if I can improve things and let you know how it goes.

2 comments:

  1. I think you're a MAC guy, so this may not be helpful. Take a look at MailWasher; maybe they can recommend a MAC work-alike. I also use Eudora as my mailer because I don't want to leave my mail on the ISP's server.

    MailWasher maintains a database of spammers and couples that with your rules to identify mail as Friend, Blacklisted, Possible Spam. You ratify MailWasher's decisions, then it deletes all the stuff marked as chaff and you are left with the wheat. Then I fire up Eudora and pull down my mail.

    The whole process is like sorting your snail mail as you walk back from the mailbox. When you get to the kitchen, all the stuff in your left hand goes into the trash, all the stuff in your right hand goes to your wife so she can pay bills. Anything leftover must be QST or other ham publications for you to read at your leisure. (grin)

    --Andy

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  2. Thank you, Andy, and yes, I'm a Mac guy.

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