Spamfilters: Useless

Monday, December 13th, 2004

I hate spamfilters.

For years now I’ve run my own server at home without problems. Suddenly my provider, C-hell-o, decides that I need some sort of semi-dynamic IP. I don’t understand why, but anyway. So guess what..

It turns out that those spamfilters have the whole UPC range blocked as ‘Spam senders’. Ooh, nice. NOT. So now I won’t be able to send any mail from my server and instead will have to relay everything to Chello’s crappy mailservers. And those don’t work half of the time.

The problem with these spamfilters is that they simply don’t work.

Filtering for keywords and assigning scores doesn’t work.. I’ve seen mails with subjects like “V 1 A G R @ – Buy it now for only $0.99 a pill”, and the score was still far below spam. While on the other hand I’ve also sent emails to people with subjects like “Re: application” and gotten in back because it was supposedly spam.. yeah, right. Spammers will always find a way around these kinds of filters.

The other filters – the origin-based ones – also don’t work. Why not, you ask? Because spammer will keep finding new places from where to send their spam, until we’ve blocked every goddamn IP in the whole world.

I’ll even go as far as too say that it is not spam that is screwing up e-mail, it’s the spamfilters!.

I give e-mail another year or two before it’s either completely unused or we just accept spam as a day-to-day nuisance and move on with our lives instead of thinking up sollutions that are even worse than the problem itself.

I’d rather receive 20 spam emails and 1 normal one than recieve 2 spam emails and miss the real one I was supposed to get.