Headers

[stoutfellow]

During his visit last year, mbernardi showed me how to configure Pegasus to allow me to download the headers of my e-mail messages, rather than the messages themselves; I can then pick and choose which messages I want downloaded, which I want deleted outright, and which I want to stay on the university server. This has been extremely handy; but identifying spam is sometimes harder than it sounds.

One of the mailing lists I belong to is that of the American Dialect Society, which (among other things) often discusses unusual words and phrases. Unfortunately, messages from that list are not marked as such, and sometimes it's a little hard to distinguish them from spam. I mean, what would you do about messages with subject headers like these?

Perfect storm, not negative
Happy Gay
curebie
Why Swedish is a backward language
Shoes sans toes
"Anal astigmatism" bad
Court rules you can't swear like a
Loses Something -- But Not Color --
Lesbos Lite

(Explanations will be provided upon request.)

Comments

[alice-q.livejournal.com]

You can configure your subscription to ADS-L to prepend [ADS-L] to the subject line of all messages. I can't find the message I sent to the listserv to get it to do that, but all my saved messages going back about 5 years are tagged on the subject line.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Thanks; I'll look into that.

gmail

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about Pegasus, so did not respond to your earlier query. But I got a gmail account a few years ago and have found it to be very useful for mailing lists. It has an excellent spam filter. You read your mail with your browser - the list display shows who from, subject and the first few words of the message, whatever fits on one line. It also has regular filters, so something sent to a particular list address can be identified on that basis and tagged and segregated. This is useful because although the spam filter is excellent, it is not perfect, and every now and then a list message will wind up in spam. Since it has the appropriate tag I can quickly remove it and throw the rest of the junk out. The tags also allow you to prioritize your attention more easily.

Also, because I am very chary about giving out my local address, I get almost no spam on it. My local ISP has a spam filter, too, but it is not nearly as reliable.

I believe you still need an invite, but they're easy to get - I'd be glad to send you one.

Re: gmail

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I'm pretty happy with the current setup. The university has a good filter; it catches about 90% of the spam that I'm sent, with very few false positives (almost always ADS-L posts). It's that remaining 10% that I have to deal with, and it's almost always obvious.

I posted this more because I found the headers amusing than because I was upset about anything.

[thebluerose.livejournal.com]

mailwasher does a similar thing, but it also downloads the first 200 words in preview screen so you can view and decide.

It also learns and can be taught to a certain extent.

The best news is there is a free version but I paid for the Pro version because it contains the preview screen with the message header list (in the free version you have to click on a suspicious message to open the preview option)

Then when you are happy you click the Download button, and it opens up your email program of choice and downloads your emails

http://www.mailwasher.net/download/?q=download