Handling the deluge of spam in your personal accounts…

I don’t know if you are like me or not, but I use the Notes client as my personal POP3 email client. I also use it stand-alone. What I mean by that is that I do not connect to a default Domino server for email. I just connect to my POP3 accounts.

Anyway, I own several domain names, and my main address was the one used to register them. Because of that, my info has been available on Whois searches for years. This has lead my main email address to get hammered by spam. I’m literally receiving around 300 messages a day that are just spam. A couple of years ago I bought SpamKiller before McAfee ruined it. It worked pretty well, but it’s somewhere around 4 versions old now, and the new version is horrible.

So, I was looking for a new solution to protect myself from spam. It is VERY hard to find a Notes client-based filter that will kill the POP3 stuff. Oh, if you’re an Outlook user, there’s a bazillion options. Just try finding a good one for Notes. It’s not easy.

So what I finally decided on was ActivatorMail. Basically this is a virus and spam protection email account. Each message is quad scanned for viruses, then scanned for spam. All spam is moved into a separate container, allowing only the good stuff to be downloaded to the client. I’m paying something like $28 a year for the account, and all I have to do is forward all of the POP3 addresses I want to into the ActivatorMail email account.

I’ll let you know how it works out. I’m going to be checking out the false positives and whitelisting capabilities pretty intensively, so I’ll let you know how it goes.