Friday, February 13, 2004

Little did I know a few years ago that by posting in newsgroups with my email address, I was committing privacy suicide. Little did I also know that clicking the “unsubscribe” links at the bottom of spam messages is about the worst thing I could do.

Nowadays I get somewhere around 300 spam emails a day. I managed pretty well by basically blocking everyone not in my address book from my inbox. This wasn’t the best solution, however, so I began looking for some anti-spam software. That’s when I stumbled upon JunkMatcher, a free junk mail killer for Mac OS X.
JunkMatcher works with Mail, OS X’s own mail program. It is easy to set up, and incredibly intelligent. For example, spam mailers will often purposely spell words wrong to fool junk filters. Instead of the subject being “Cheap Viagra,” they’ll write “Cheep V1AGRA” (notice the number “1” for the letter “I”). This doesn’t fool JunkMatcher. It looks for any combinations by using the code:

(?i)(?:(?#v-)(?#i-)(?#a-)(?#g-)(?#r-)(?#a)

The spam mail appears in your inbox for a few seconds, but then they get “red flagged” and moved to the junk mail folder.

How does it work? Well, as mentioned above, it checks its own spam “blacklist” of subjects, contents, addresses, URLs, etc. It also checks up to three internet-based directories which keep an up-to-date listing of “bad” senders. You can monitor its actions and change just about everything this script does by opening the control program called "JunkMatcher Central." It has an activity log that looks like this:

You can download JunkMatcher here.