1/3 of e-mail is now spam – no problem!

Over at the Register, a statistic that is quite believable based on what is arriving in my mailbox.

But I barely receive any spam into my inbox now, given the tools that I’ve put in place. One of the eight Linux servers in my home grabs all the mail sent to my main inbox. I use procmail to first run a test against all the mail, accepting mail from known sources. It then runs it against Pyzor, which seems to accurately weed out a huge amount of inbound spam. Then, another series of tests are run using SpamAssassin, which gets rid of another large chunk. And finally, SpamPal processes any remaining stuff that might manage to get through the first two!

Does it work? You betcha — I figure it’s now weeding out 99.9% of all spam, and letting only the real stuff get through. (I have a look at the spam every once in a while, and for the last month, only one or two real messages per week have been labelled as spam). Pyzor seems to be the most effective tool, bar none, but SpamAssassin does wonders too.