Well, it’s day one on the big 30-day Free Trial experiment of Spam Arrest. Since I use multiple pop accounts I decided I’d start with my biggest email offender, my main webmaster@ account. And, since I use Microsoft Outlook (2003) and pop accounts, it was a bit of a job getting it all set up right.

Don’t get me wrong – the configuration instructions at Spam Arrest are quite clear, I was having trouble figuring out how to deal with several kinds of spam: garden variety, spam generated by my own server as I hunt down and close all the relays spammers are using to spoof my address (thank you Verio, for all the great support), and trash to a bunch of aliases I just can’t shut down in case the one random person tries to reach me.

When you manage a number of high-traffic web sites and your own virtual server, it gets pretty complex figuring out what rules to use, whether to allow mail from your own domain (I frequently ‘mail’ myself things between computers when my remote file transfer is buggy). For the average user though it is dead simple to set this system up, and customize the message your users get when you’re asking them to take an extra step of adding themselves to your safe sender’s list by completing a one-time captcha routine.

So far, I am picking through my unverified box a few times a day and finding ‘real’ addresses to authenticate, but on the good side, I got 10 pieces of mail today that landed in my Outlook inbox!! If I can keep it up, I’ll soon be able to add this critical email account to my blackberry.

http://www.spamarrest.com