Spam Free Email

I was over at http://www.apache.org/ looking for some Java code to help with my IP database project and I notice a nice little link on the leftbar labeled ”’SpamAssassin”’. This got my interested right away, I thought SpamAssassin was a commercial product, not open source.

So upon checking it out at http://spamassassin.apache.org/ I was happy to find that it is an open source project that is the basis for many commerical projects.

Now that I know that SpamAssassin is open source I’m seriously thinking of getting back into the idea of creating an anti spam store and forward email server. I’m going to see what it will take to put a single server together to do this and try it on a few of my domains.

I’ll let you know how it goes on this blogs, but if it goes well I’d hope to have a service that would greatly reduce spam for a very low cost.

Even better would be a package that could easily be put on some hardware and anyone could create an anti spam store and forward email server out of a spare PC that they having laying around.

The Nigerian Scam, also known as Advance Fee Fraud Scheme is one of the oldest scams on the Internet. It may be one of the oldest schemes out there.

The idea is that some poor soul has millions or billions of US dollars and needs your help to get out of this country. If only you could send them $5,000 to pay for them and their family to get out of the country they will give you half the money.

I’m sure most of you reading this have gotten one of these in your email box and laughed. I had a client ask me about one just yesterday. She of course had deleted the message already, thank god, but it was the conversation that got me.

She knew that it was a scam, but wanted to ask me just in case. I was pretty sure up till that point that anyone who had used email for a while knew about the Nigerian Scam and just deleted them, and that it was only niave newbies that got caught by that one these days.

So the moral of todays story: ”’If it looks to good to be true, it probably is”’