On average, I have received just over 200 pieces of spam for each legitimate email that’s gone to my Dartmouth account over the past two months.
My spam filter, which works with Dartmouth’s, has about a 95 percent success rate, so that I actually see only 10 spam messages for each legitimate email–except during the daytime, when I access Blitzmail directly and enjoy no filtering whatsoever.
It turns out that a good deal of this unwanted mail goes to the dartlog@dartreview.com address, which, when I’m at home, does get filtered a bit more rigorously than my direct address. A fair bit comes through my Blitzmail nicknames, which I can probably discard.
The ideal situation, though, would be to somehow make my mail filter available during the day, perhaps with some sort of web-based interface. One option, as I’ll soon be moving, is maintaining an unfirewalled and un-NAT’d ‘Net connection and running VNC on my laptop. This way, I would be able to interact with my favorite mail client software directly, even from work. This assumes, however, that VNC servers can be reached from behind my corporate firewall, which forget about it. I doubt it would work over port 80 (normally used for web servers), even.
But there is one other way to do this. I could run a web server and web-mail application on my laptop that feeds off of my non-web client’s mbox files. Sure, I wouldn’t be able to move things around (probably), but sending mail should be no problem.
Still, I feel like there should be a better solution. My goals: 1) have the best possible filtering available at all times, from all platforms; 2) send on filtered mail to Blackberry; and 3) keep everything transparently concurrent. Considered in that light, my current system meets only #3 (thanks to IMAP, which delightfully ‘just works’). Using VNC would meet #2 and #3, at best. Using web-mail would meet #1 and #2, but not #3.
This shouldn’t be impossible.