Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Spam

Today the Jesus College Squirrelmail server was down, meaning I had to log in to my webmail via the usual Herald interface - which I still find absolutely horrible. (In fairness, it does have extra functionality, and some of my dislike is presumably due to lack of familiarity, but I still find it cumbersome in many respects).

It didn't help me retrieve my mail - for whatever reason that was backlogged until the Squirrelmail returned with 41 new messages (mostly junk). While playing around with Herald, however, I did find out why I seemed to be consistently near my quota - I had 2000 messages in my junk mail folder!

For some reason, while they share an inbox and other folders, the Herald junkmail doesn't seem to have anything to do with Squirrelmail's spambin. After finding that nothing seemed to go into my spambin, I'd pretty much given up checking and assumed the filter wasn't doing much. I don't mind, I think it's probably easier to delete the crap from my inbox rather than have two folders to check anyway.

As it is, however, there was a large collection of junk that I hadn't been able to check. Probably at least half of it I really didn't want, though quite a few were the sort of mailing list/alert that while not particularly important I'd have liked to have seen then deleted. There were also a few from real people that had somehow been snatched by the over-zealous filter. (Sorry Rob and Mark)

Needless to say, though it took me at least an hour to sort through, I have now added a dozen or so addresses to my whitelist and adjusted the filter settings. Also I find a 25% point reduction in my quota use, so at least that's something.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:34 pm

    Oxford's two-headed mail system is really strange. Partly on account of that, I only use it when I need to provide an email to a site almost certain to spam me. For everything important, I use GMail.

    After all, I am only going to have an Oxford account for another year.

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