You guys know how much I love/hate spam. Well, I decided that getting a couple hundred messages in my junk folder to sort through was a little old and looked around to see if I could do something about that. I found DSpam and wanted desperately to find a personal version of it to run, since it's a server-based anti-spam solution.

I haven't found one yet, but I did find that the web-based email I use called Runbox installed DSpam a bit ago! Since I was using some specialized spam-fighting tools via Runbox's excellent filtering, I was bypassing DSpam, focusing on their SpamAssassin configuration's results for incoming email ratings (spam or ham), but the cool thing is that Runbox's dual-solution was set up such that I was training DSpam at the same time that I was training SpamAssassin.

I switched to using DSpam as my primary anti-spam filtering solution on Runbox and set up another filter that would automatically delete messages that SpamAssassin found egregiously spammy as a just in case. My incoming spam to sort through dropped about 90% and after testing, I haven't had a miscategorized ham yet after several days of banging away on it. I haven't hit it hard yet, doing things like forwarding spam from another account over to my Runbox account to see what it does, but I am thoroughly impressed.

And this is my Christmas gift to you technically minded folks out there: If you run a mail server, do what you can to set up DSpam on it. Your server hardware and your users will thank you. If you have an in with an email server admin, mention DSpam to them.

Have yourselves some fine year-end holidays! Be safe and all that good stuff.