i finally got my email server, qmail, set up on my linux box, and theres a really nice anti-spam package available for it called TMDA. basically when you get an email from an address that you dont have in your whitelist, it replies and asks them to confirm that they are a real person. when they reply to that email, it adds them to the whitelist and lets their email through, and then in the future they dont have to confirm. it works great! ive got two mailboxes setup side by side, one with the filtering and one without, to see if any valid messages get held without the people confirming, but so far it has worked perfectly. its so damn nice having zero spam (whereas before, i got 70-100 messages a day) and knowing that any real person can still get in touch with me, so i dont have to worry about losing real messages like some heuristic-based packages do. i just got home and had three valid messages in my inbox, and 78 messages in my unfiltered mailbox, and it made me happy. the program has all kinds of other options for sending email from a special email address that people can reply to for X days without having to confirm, or that certain email addresses can reply to freely, etc. but it works well enough for me just as it is. i'm eager to just get rid of the other mailbox and be rid of the spam forever, but i figure i'll watch it a few more days to be sure nothing valid gets held.

i can't believe livejournal doesnt have an option for "euphoric".

Originally posted on LiveJournal. Original post