I have been working on the Internet since 1997. Back in those days, spam was unknown (at least in my circle). I was one of the first people in my circle to ever become a reseller for a hosting company, managing my own private server through Verio (Iserver way back then). I was learning everything – unix commands, coding HTML, perl and scripting, cgi, javascript – and I was a totally self-taught geek coming late to the game after spending 15 years in small community newspapers doing production management. In fact I had just finished riding the change from the old compugraphic typeset-to-waxer into desktop publishing, and going from Mac to PC to Mac again. Learning and changing was a part of the way I did things.

However, in my naivety and short pants, I made the fatal mistake – like many did back in the day – of making my main email address the root address for the domain. Webmaster@. The legacy of this lives on today, in the approximate 1600 pieces of spam I receive each and every day, even running SpamAssassin on my server.

I recently read uber-blogger  Tim Ferris’ post about outsourcing email (when my ratio of ‘real’ mail exceeds my spam I’ll take another look at outsourcing) and noticed he doesn’t suffer much from spam. This is the best-selling author of The Four Hour Work Week (now in its 40th printing, in 33 languages), an international speaker, adventurer and networker extraordinaire. To say he’s not suffering from spam is like the Post Office saying everyone takes their flyers home instead of dumping them in the recycling bin. My first reaction? Yeah, right.

So I will be the first test case with Spam Arrest. I’m off to set up my 30 day trial account and I’ll update this post with results as I get them, hopefully in a much leaner inbox!