News Finding Bad Spam Delights Geeks

From Wired:

When freelance Web developer Joe Stump first installed the e-mail filtering program SpamAssassin, he and a friend started a competition. Each day, the two would look through their junk e-mail and try to find the missive that SpamAssassin had assigned the highest score.

"It was always a little contest between the two of us," says Stump. "We were always trying to tweak and modify the settings to get it just right. I finally won the contest when I got a spam with a score of 43."

The popularity of SpamAssassin for filtering out unwanted mail has given birth to a new pastime for many of its users -- poring over their deleted mail to find the most egregious spam, at least as ranked by the software.

"It seems to be almost universal," says Mark Pilgrim, a Web developer and professional trainer in Apex, North Carolina, and the author of a popular weblog about programming. "Everyone seems to be, 'Ooh, look! Points!'"

Full story here

The final quote of the article is oh so true....

 

SpamAssasin is really great. I use it on one of my accounts because the people who give you the account were kind enough to install it. On my normal account however I use Spam Detective which is a pop3 spam catcher that sits in the system tray. It works quite well when you set it to block emails containing certain words and phrases but it's not much more advanced that that. Does anyone know of a kind of cross between the two? I'd like to have a program which checks email every 3 minutes and test messages for spam using SpamAssasin's rules. That would be great but I've yet to find such a product.