Hands-On Report--Killing Spam with Sp@mX at Week 3

Our spam problem had become overwhelming, over 600 spam messages per day that occasionally surpassed twice that. We had been tackling it with our web host's server level filter, Spam Assassin, that marks spam as JUNK before we download it and with Apple Mail's Junk filter. If we could just delete the result, we would still have the problem while traveling of having to download all that spam through a slow dial up connection. But we can't even delete the filtered spam because Spam Assassin and Apple Mail occasionally make mistakes and filter out mail we want, like 5 or so per day. So we have had to manually scan through 600+ spam messages before deleting them, a very time-consuming process and not 100 per cent accurate either.

Three weeks ago we began a trial of Sp@mX, now at v3.0.7 by hsc. It's a $20 application that automatically, more or less, reports spam to the server admins that handled the spam on the way with copies to the FTC and the California Dept. of Justice. It relies on server admins to take action to block the spam based on the reports. Here is our review.

We provided a progress report at the end of week one of our use of Sp@mX and a second report at the end of week 2. In the first week our spam messages had decreased from over 600 per day to an average of 360 per day, a remarkable 40 plus per cent reduction. During week two of our trial we processed a total of 1,640 spam messages or 234 per day for a 35 per cent reduction below the week one rate.

In week 3 we processed 1,145 spam messages or 164 per day for another 30 per cent reduction.

During week 3 we received 101 server acknowledgements of our abuse reports on 1,145 spam messages processed. This compares with 191 on 2,523 in week 1 and 213 on 1,640 in week 2.

We still get lots of Mail Return Errors, 54 during week 3. We got 75 each of the first two weeks.

Sp@mX still seems to be working as advertised. Our spam messages have been reduced by 40+, 35 and 30 per cent in the three weeks that we have been using it. Our spam message load has gone from over 4000 per week down to 1145, a significant reduction if not zero. We have processed 5308 spam messages and seem to be headed towards zero but the rate of decrease is slowing some. Next week we'll post the results for the fourth and final week of this trial. [Bill Fox]