Finally a personal solution to spam

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[Ben]:	Finally a personal solution to spam	Discuss This [0 comments so far] View Comments
For years I've used the same domain name and same Exchange server. I've been nervous to upgrade to newer Exchange iterations mostly because I want to keep the contents of my account and don't want to screw up something that is working just fine. Unfortunately, having the same domain for many years tends to lead to some issues with spam. It is not unusual for me to receive between 800 and 1,000 email messages on any given day. Of those messages, usually about 98.5% are unwanted junk. Most of that is processed out by Exchange's Intelligent Message Filtering, but my five year old version isn't all that fantastic at doing the job, and certainly isn't as reliable as a subscription-based service. Part of the problem is that my main email address is set to a catchall account designed to allow me to segment emails on the fly. For instance, I could sign up for a mailing list at a store and use the format [email protected] to ensure that I could at any point cut off emails to that account if they were to sell it to someone else for marketing purposes. It also lets me set up filters to sort emails more effectively. Unfortunately, while I love the flexibility this gives mes, it means I am particularly susceptible to dictionary attacks where someone will try random words @benswenson.com ... most of which will - if not caught by my spam filter - make it to my inbox. In times past I've tried creating email rules on my account to filter out these junk messages, but quickly reached Exchange 2003's limit on rule size. Last night I finally sat down and started universally blocking the most egregious senders and false recipients. After blocking 44 target addresses and 7 sending addresses last night, I cut back on received spam (including filtered) to almost nothing. A few more weeks of doing this should really clear things up. Why didn't I think of this before?