Spam: 0, Me: 384
I'm sold.
I tried SpamArrest on a whim after seeing the honorable Hanselman mention it a few days ago. One word: Wow.
I'd been using SpamNet, which is a fine service, but was really tiring of the constant Outlook alerts notifying me of new spam. Add that to the occasionally false positives (and many false negatives) and I had to find something else.
SpamArrest works by inserting itself between your email client (which means it works with any POP3 client) and your POP3 server. It pulls email from your mail server and only passes along email from senders that are in your “verified senders” list. How do people get on that list? I'm glad you asked. There are a number of ways to populate this list yourself:
- Import contacts from your email client
- Manually type in email addresses
- Add TO: addresses to the “Mailing Lists“ list. (This is good for things like “somegroup@yahoogroups.com“, where there may be hundreds of different senders.)
The magic part is what the service is all about: When someone that isn't on your white list sends you an email, SpamArrest sends them an email informing them that they aren't in your verified senders list. They follow a link to the website, type in a word that's displayed in an obfuscated image and automatically add themselves to your verified senders list. The concept behind the service is that spammers either won't get these emails because their From header is invalid, or won't go through the hassle of adding themselves to your list. What if they do add themselves? You can also block email addresses so they'll never come through to you.
The big gotcha (you knew there was one!) is that automated, non-spam email won't come through by itself. This requires that you periodically check the SpamArrest web site and manually add senders of emails that have been queued waiting for approval. This is easily done by clicking a button and becomes less of an issue over time as you add the frequent auto-emailers to your list.
Here's what my setup looks like after three or four days of use:
- 802 emails processed
- 418 emails forwarded to me
- 120 verified senders
- 9 mailing lists
- 0 spam
So, is it worth the hassle? I think so. When it comes to dealing with spam, you're going to have to put in some work. SpamArrest, so far, requires the least amount of time from me. The best part is that I don't have all this traffic in my email client, I don't need to check for false positives every five minutes and I don't need to delete false negatives every time I check my inbox. Not only that, but it's pretty cheap at $20/six months.