How I Beat Spam with Spam Arrest

A couple weeks ago, I wrote two articles on dealing with Spam. One article was about my new approach to heading off Spam before it starts with a new email address. The other article was a wish list for “The Ultimate Spam Blocker†.

I have made some great progress since then. Let me first describe my situation. I had two primary email addresses. A Yahoo address for personal email that I have had for nearly 10 years, which receives hundreds of Spam emails every day. I also have a business email address that has been around for 12 years, which gets almost 100 pieces of Spam everyday. I recently became a Blackberry user with a Pearl. I love the Blackberry, but obviously having Spam coming to my phone is almost as annoying as telemarketers.

I decided to ditch my Yahoo mail and start using a personal domain name email. I put a lot of thought into how I got Spam, and I started to make a list on how to avoid it. You can find that article here.

I obviously cannot easily change my business email, so I had to figure out a way to block the Spam from my email, while not risking the loss of important communication from clients, employees or partners. I wrote what I thought would be The Ultimate Spam Blocker.

Let take a moment here and describe our current email situation in the company. We just switched from Exchange server to Zimbra. So far I’m not overly impressed with Zimbra, but I did hate Exchange. Exchange became obsolete when half the company, including myself, moved to Mac. Exchange support for Mac is not very good, so many of us were not seeing any benefit beyond basic POP email. But Zimbra really doesn’t seem to live up to the expectations in calendar sharing with Mac either. But that’s for another post.

It looks like 90% of what I wanted in a Spam filter can be found with Spam Arrest. This is an interesting application. Most of you have probably seen the mail applications that send back an email asking you to verify you’re a real person if you are not on their whitelist. I thought these were great, if it was easy to manage the whitelist. Spam Arrest does that. The whitelsit is first set up, and you can import a spreadsheet of emails, or add them manually. You can also add entire domains, which for me is very useful. I only have a couple dozen individual email addresses, but I have hundreds of domains entered. Obviously I want anyone at a clients company to be able to email me without incident.

After setting up your whitelist, which is really easy, there are several ways to make additions. First, you can obviously log in and add emails and domains whenever you like. Second, when someone emails you and gets a verification email, they can verify and be added to the list. Third, when you email someone, they are automatically added to the list, which is important to not look silly when someone’s reply gets challenged.

Spam Arrest has a couple other nice features. You can customize the verification request email with different text. For an extra cost, you can even add your logo and make other changes.

You also have the ability to add rules that allow emails to come in unchallenged. For example, I have a contact form on this blog. When someone fills that out, it looks like it comes from his or her email, but the subject is always the same. So, I was able to make a rule that allowed those contact emails to come into my email without incident.

You also have the ability to check unverified emails. You can read, authorize, delete, block etc†¦ from their web based system.

Spam Arrest has another nice feature to it’s design. I assumed that Spam Arrest would be something I point my MX record to, just like if I was going to use Gmail for my email. But it actually works by having Spam Arrest act as an email client. You enter your POP or IMAP settings into Spam Arrest, and it pulls your email just like any email client would. But then you can enter the Spam Arrest settings into your client (Outlook, Mail, Entourage, etc†¦), and it pulls the email from Spam Arrest. This seems like a clumsy way of handling email, but it’s actually very smart because it lets you use any email system, including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc†¦

I set Spam Arrest up for my personal email, and after over a week with no issues, I set up my business email. I took a couple days to enter all the addresses and domains I wanted to be clear, and then made the switch. With the exception of a small error on my part, which I will mention below, everything went very smooth. This morning I got up and checked my Blackberry for emails. I was very happy to see only 6 emails, all of which were actual emails for me. I then checked the unverified emails on the Spam Arrest site, and I found only garbage.

So, because I use Firefox, I don’t get pop ups, because I’m on a Mac, I don’t get viruses and AdWare (and I don’t crash), and because I’m using Spam Arrest, I don’t get Spam. This is the way computing was supposed to be.

A couple further wishes for Spam Arrest.

1. I would love to see a plug-in for Outlook and Mail that let you check unverified emails, and authorize emails and domains from the email client.

2. I would also love to see a Spam Arrest Zimlet for Zimbra. Since many people using Zimbra get email sent to their phone, we are even more likely to use this solution than most. And the fact that you have to run email through Spam Arrest’s site kills the “push† to mobile feature on Zimbra.

I sent an email to Spam Arrest asking about these issues.

Help Using Cingular Blackberry with Spam Arrest

I ran into a small, but annoying issue when setting up my Spam Arrest with Blackberry. On the Cingular site where you enter your info for email to come to the phone, it tries to determine your MX record automatically, so as to save you from having to enter your server info. Because the password for my Spam Arrest and email host was the same, it verified the email host as the sole source I wanted, which means it wouldn’t let me enter my Spam Arrest info. I fixed this by switching my password for my email host to something different than Spam Arrest. Cingular was then unable to check my email and asked for server settings, at which time I could enter the Spam Arrest info. This may not make sense to most who read this, but it will to those reading this that is having this issue.

If you’re going to sign up for Spam Arrest, use my affiliate ID and I get paid for referring you. Here it is:

http://www.spamarrest.com/affl?4037008

[tags]spam, spam arrest, zimbra, zimet[/tags]