my life

I forgot what it’s like when packages just don’t install. Remember, the days of RH6, where you’d have to spend a day tracking down all the dependencies only to discover that some tiny POS package prevented the whole install. That’s kind’a how Fedora is today. In fact, I don’t notice any improvements over the old Redhat package management system. Yum runs about the same speed as it did on my 486; quite a remarkable task given that the processing power on my new system is equivalent to a small server farm of 486 units. How can they make something so slow? Having used Debian for the last few years, I feel entirely spoiled.

I’ve been an avid Thunderbird user for sometime. One of the biggest draws was its Bayesian JMC. It works for the most part, but hasn’t stood its ground against the constantly evolving spammers. Stock/Image spam being the most effective at escaping detection. I’d say about 5% of spam get’s through. If you take that as a part of the 1000 daily spam emails I get, it’s significant. 50 spams is like what we used to get in ‘97 without filters… and that was annoying!

Thus, I’ve decided that I can’t be bothered any more by the constant email notifications of new spam! This whole class of problems has virtually disappeared for me by creating a simple filter that checks if the sender is in one of my address books. I keep one for automated emails (like those from eBay or mailing lists) and one for personal contacts. Any mail that’s not in one of these lists and isn’t already flagged as spam get’s shoved into a “Unknown Senders” folder that I can check periodically. Since most of my good email comes from known sources, this wins out over the Bayesian filtering.

This is nothing new. The solution has been around for about as long as spam has been. And I still love the JMC in TB. I didn’t disable them; infact, I still keep training them with those emails that end up in “Unknown Senders”. The benefit is now I it’s just easier to flag them as spam and I can do it once a week instead of once an hour.