February 16, 2005
A Spam Strategy
An article at Inifinite Ink has what I think is the best strategy yet for dealing with spam. The author calls the technique reverse spam filtering.
The idea basically is to filter non-spam rather than spam. That's why it's called reverse filtering. If you use this technique, most of your mail goes into a default folder, assuming that mail is mostly spam. The mail your reverse filter selects goes into your inbox. You may also review mail in the default folder, but the recommended way to do this is to sort the messages by their spam score. You view the messages starting with the lowest spam score and stop when you feel you've viewed enough.
The article mentions a few tricks that I was never aware of. For example, if you have your spam filter to put the spam score at the beginning of the subject line, then you can easily sort messages by their spam scores.
