A while ago, I gave up on most E-Mail programs’ built-in filtering, and made up my own hodgepodge of technologies, which are doing a remarkably good job. Every now and then, some new spam variation will come out and I’ll get a few that make it to my Inbox, but it’s filtering nearly 100% (well over 99%) of them without any active maintenance on my part (yay cron!).

Every now and then, I look at my “Black” folder, usually when people tell me that they’ve sent an E-Mail that I haven’t received (not that I’ve ever had a false positive, but there’s always a first time for everything), and am increasingly amazed at the obscenities that can be included on a subject line. I can understand that 0.0001% of readers would be crazy enough to buy a domain, logo, cheap imported watch, body-enhancing drug, or think that they can get rich from a Nigerian scam, or even think that they can look at improper images of celebrities or young people without having it linked to their E-Mail address and become the target for viruses and thousands more similar and worse offers even if they don’t give up their credit card information and become victims of identity theft to boot, <taking a breath> but most of the subject lines I’m seeing these days make my eyes water just looking at them — who would even open the messages behind these obscene subject lines?

Is the goal to sell something, or is it just an attempt to ruin E-Mail for everyone? The latter would make some sense, but I apparently don’t have a good enough handle on the depravity of man if even a millionth of a percent of people would intentionally look at these messages, let alone pursue whatever’s in them.

Anyway, I remain very grateful for my mail filtering setup. Over 500 messages this week that I haven’t had to delete, purely on Bayesian filtering, never mind the blacklists or other filtering.