My day usually begins by firing up my laptop and starting Thunderbird (my e-mail client) and checking though my e-mail. On an average day I get roughly 1400 or so e-mails. Of that 1400 about 200 or more are spam. I loath SPAM with a passion and just being forced to read the subjects and from address’s is enough to drive me into “spamrage”. (which is similar to roadrage only safer for innocent bystanders.)

My method of reducing my personal SPAM problem is twofold.
First on my Linux mail server, I run Postfix with Amavisd-new combined with Spamassassin and Clamd antivirus which when combined, scan all incoming and outgoing mail for both SPAM and virus’s.
Secondly I use the inbuilt SPAM filter in the free Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows, Linux and Mac versions available) which learns from the mail I get to increase its accuracy in SPAM detection. Between the two methods, I only find on average, 1 spam a week that hasn’t already been dumped into my SPAM folder. (Thereby significantly reducing my Spamrage.)

Anyway, once again I digress, the reason for this post is to prove that no matter how bad you think your net experience is some people have it worse.
Take the sight impaired people among us for example, they rely on screen readers to audibly tell them what they are “looking at”, now close your eyes and imagine it reading out your e-mail every day.
Makes you feel better about your own SPAM plight doesn’t it?

Wired.com has a report on the plight of the blind e-mail reader.
The latest trend the evil spammers are using, is to fill SPAM e-mails with gibberish in order to fool SPAM filters that work by looking for patterns. When a text to speech engine encounters gibberish like this, the standard response is to read it out character by character. That’s just too nasty to even think about. (Not to mention some of the words that would be read out in porn SPAM, (assuming any text to speech engines recognize those particular words.)

Its unlikely that the worldwide SPAM problem will be resolved anytime soon. When it does it’s likely to be a combination of technology and laws that will do the trick, but in the meantime we have to contend with SPAM filters and other such tools to try and limit their effect on our lives.

So the next time your on the verge of spamrage, spare a thought for the sight impaired, as their experience is far worse then the rest of us.

regards

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004 at 7:57 pm