i’m trying out knowspam.net,

a junk mail blocking service that basically works by popping in between

you and your pop3 mail server and filtering your email according to a

white list and a black list. white list mail comes through to you and

black list mail heads off into the bit bucket.

senders who aren’t on the black or the white list get sent a message

asking them to prove they are human by visiting a web page and

transcribing a few numbers from an image.. so far my only real quibble

with the system is that i can’t turn off this “prove you’re human”

message while i build up my white list, though i can customise the

message that is sent.

the junk mail filtering i have set up in mozilla (which works on a

statistical basis seeing how similar a new mail is to others that i’ve

told it are junk) is actually working pretty well already but i catch

it junking good messages often enough to worry me. no doubt this is my

fault because i’ve accidently marked good messages as junk before but i

feel more comfortable with a system where i can see the blacklisted

addresses for myself. plus i’m fed up of actually having to download

junk messages and then binning them, with this system the emails don’t

make it past knowspam’s server.

all in all knowspam looks pretty good and though i can see sorting

out the possible spam could become a pain i really don’t think it

compares to the pain of manually junking several hundred viagra offers

each day. we’ll see how it goes.