So are we.  No, really.  We’re working on a plugin that will trace a spam message back to the guy who sent it to you and smack ‘em in the head.  But until that’s functional, we have the next best thing:

Auto spam learning!

Yes, your friends here at Geek Niche are just about as fed up as you are, and we’ve decided to do something about it.  If you want to take advantage of this, all you need to do is send an email to paul@geekniche.com and let me know a) that you want to have your spam auto-learned and b) which email addresses you want to have included in this.

There are a couple of pre-requisites though.  First, you need to be using IMAP for email instead of POP3.  If your eyes just crossed, no worries.  IMAP means that your email stays on our servers, and you just read it in Outlook/on the web/whatever.  With POP3, the email is actually downloaded off of our servers and stored on your local PC.  Once it’s off our servers, there’s nothing we can do about it; we’re good, but we’re not that good.  If you’re unsure which you’re using, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

The second requirement is that you create a folder under your inbox titled “Spam”.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Once we get everything set up, you’ll receive email as usual.  Some of the email will be prefixed with the term “***SPAM***”.  This is good.  This means that the system has correctly identified this email as spam, but hasn’t deleted it, since we’re still in the process of fine-tuning your particular spam setup.  Some of your email will NOT be marked with “***SPAM***” despite the fact that it clearly is.  This where you come in.

When you get an email message that is clearly spam, but not marked as spam, just put it in the “Spam” folder.  That’s it.  No, really.  Nothing more to it.  Every hour, our Spam Learning Awesome Patent Pending Internet Thing (SLAPPIT) will go through that folder and if it finds a message there, it will mark that email as spam, learn from it, and delete it.  After roughly a week (slightly longer at higher altitudes) the system should be trained well enough that we can turn on the auto-delete feature.  This means that anything the system thinks is spam will be deleted before it ever hits your inbox.  Nifty, eh?

So as soon as you’re ready to reduce the amount of offers for reverse mortgages and Reservatrol (EDITOR’S NOTE: seriously, is there anything that drug CAN’T do?) drop me a line and I’ll get you taken care of.

For the technically-minded: this solution leverages our use of Plesk and spamassassin along with a fairly robust custom script that we wrote.  Want it?  Be my guest.  Comments/criticisms/improvements welcomed.