There is nothing like the aroma of fresh burned Spam
My desktop has got one of those little stocks and shares counters, the sort that check-in every five minutes to see what price shares are selling at. In this case it’s the free ones which Standard Life tried to buy us off with when they stole…err…sold the company we used to be a part owners in. Part owners with with all the others with Standard Life Mutual pensions and investments, which by gross mismanagement went pear-shaped. The funny thing is the guys who created the screw-ups in the first place all retired with pension increases larger than any money we are ever likely to get for the whole of our retired lives.
The interesting and often depressing thing to see from the little shares application is how easy it is make or lose money. You can start the day with five grand in shares, by coffee time it’s only worth four thousand and something and bums haven’t left seats. Equally, by dinner time they might be worth quite a bit more than five grand. Today I popped out to the shops and lost the best part of two hundred quid while gone.

The situation gets worse
At the same time, the junk mailbox emptied earlier that morning will have quietly filled with another couple of hundred spam mailings. Checking while writing this, another 88 arrived in the last two hours with only two of those incorrectly identified as spam by the ISP’s filter and accepted as such by the filters this end.
According to latest data from various sources such as here total spam has increased by 222% since 2005 with 125% in the last six months alone. Worse still - for Windows users that is – malware threats in the first quarter of 2007 doubled to nearly 24 thousand over the same quarter last year. Infected e-mails dropped to “only” 1 in every 256 e-mails, down from 1 in every 77. As another 6 junk mails arrived while typing this paragraph, there must be a huge amount getting through to me every week, part of the hundreds of junk mailings arriving every day.

Nuts screws washers and bolts
Which brings up the point of this blog. The mail filters in most e-mail packages are a bit lightweight. A free additional one called JunkMatcher, here is proving to be a virtually zero-configuration solution and pretty much stopped all junk mail from day one, including those from Screwfix which I need.
Written by Ben Han, currently a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon, JunkMatcher works well with Mail.app on Mac OS X, filtering spam by using a naive Bayesian filter, a blacklist look-up and by spotting regular expressions. It even writes its own rules for Mail.app.
As it does exactly what it says it will do, there isn’t any more to say…