spam and power
I got so fed up by the amount of spam I was getting. I’d been using an external service that I originally got in on during a beta period, but it wasn’t working very well lately, probably because people are supposed to have to pay to use it now. I really liked the ease of being able to click a "this is spam" button and have it marked and have that sender be blocked from then on; and then that database was shared with all users, so I was getting the benefit of everyone’s marking. So yeah, that was the easiest thing I’d found yet for managing my spam.
The more I enjoy Mozilla Firebird, though, the more I’ve read about Mozilla Thunderbird, its mail program. Its spam filters are "trainable" and so I figured I’d import my Outlook mail in and see how it did with that. Yesterday, I got it all imported and set up, and seems to be working well. So far, its put almost 400 emails in my spam box from the last 24 hours. Yep, they are all valid spam, that’s a freakin' lot, no wonder I was getting annoyed! I went ahead and got 0.3 the release candidate, and it seem pretty stable, although I’ve seen a few times that email titles have disappeared until I restarted. But then everything was fine on restart of the program. 
So that was yesterday!
This morning, I was playing Age of Mythology while eating breakfast, and the power went out. It scared me for a minute, and then came back on. So it was my nap time anyhow, so I went to sleep, and when I got back up, I attempted to get back into the game and it started, but then crashed. After that point, no games were working. E decided that my video card, the brand new one, isn’t working, as none of the DirectX tests are successful. 
Its only a little over a week old, how on earth did that happen? We have surge protectors, so the power outage shouldn’t have killed it. I’m so sad. And I feel bad, because E did a lot to get it to work the first time around; the drivers weren’t working right out of the box.
Happy stuff, though - we are celebrating Matthew’s birthday tomorrow evening, so that will be fun. I got to put together some of my Leah/family pictures into a picture frame this evening while E was working on my computer.
Catching up with some stuff now...
Comments
what a nuisance about the spam. i have 17 messages in my spam folder when i first checked email this morning. ugh. i use spam assassin through the hosting company and it works pretty well, what irritates me though is that i still have to download the silly message which takes up time. bah.
Posted by: jane | October 11, 2003 08:29 AM
i LOVE thunderbird. i’ve actually been using it for a while, but just set up the spam junk filter a few days ago and it’s learning very quickly.
Posted by: reb | October 11, 2003 09:35 AM
I’ve never used a computer-based e-mail program...I just prefer to keep everything on the web, probably because I tend to switch computers often and I like to have everything at my fingertips. I’m using my host’s e-mail now (I
Blogomania!) and I’m actually pretty happy with the way SpamAssassin handles the junk. I have plenty of filters set up, too, and it usually works out that I don’t get too much crap.
Posted by: Meredith | October 12, 2003 07:45 AM
I am downloading Thunderbird as I’m typing this - how weird! I downloaded Firebird the other day and it’s pretty awesome. I do rely on my Outlook Calendar and Reminders quite a bit, but I’m just going to have to find a workaround, because I am absolutely drowning in spam. I’m using Spam Assassin, but am finding it hard to train because I’m not really a command prompt guru....anyway Thunderbird has 75% left to go and then I will try it out!
Posted by: beTh | October 12, 2003 07:53 PM
Spam Assassin is my close personal friend. PhotoMatt set things up so that if it’s flagged as spam, it will move right on in to my "spam" folder so I can clean them out later. In 6 months, it has only flagged one legitimate message as spam. All the others were really truly spam, and I was happy to be rid of them! Like you, I get hundreds every day - so I need something very simple and easy so I can handle them!
Posted by: Christine | October 12, 2003 09:29 PM