I’ve been having some problems dealing with emails lately. I’m now up to anywhere from 500-800 emails a day now — on the accounts I check daily only — and that’s been difficult to deal with seing how 80-90% of junk email.

My problem is that I’ve always been hesitant to setup junk mail filtering because I’m always afraid of losing emails. I decided to do something tonight because I simply couldn’t deal with all the mails anymore.

Step 1 was setting up the mail server (postfix on Linux for me) to use some real-time black lists. That step, alone, removed a ton of SPAM for my personal accounts. That was awesome, but of course it’s no good for all the accounts that do not live on my server, including my 3 accounts at work that get a ton and a half of SPAM daily.

I looked around online and someone on a random forum suggested SpamSieve, a Mac OS X software I had tried a few years ago and discarded immediately. The setup is quite easy and the documented suggested training it with 1000 emails, 65% of which are SPAM. A few minutes later I was all done and now I’m waiting to see the results. So far, so good, but I hope I don’t get too many false positive.

In the past 5 hours or so since I started this, I haven’t received a single SPAM that was not either deleted by the server or wasn’t detected by SpamSieve. This is unheard of. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence, one got through.