Spamassassin, etc.

Okay, so, when I checked Salon today, there was this article in the tech section about SpamAssassin, a nifty Perl-based spamfighting tool that applies filters and algorithms to incoming messages to determine if a message is spam, and if so, zap it to a folder where it can be examined and disposed of at one's leisure. UNIX-type systems only, though someone's coming out with a commercial version for Windows...but given that Debian is my main mail-receiving OS, this suits me just fine. Setup was a little tricky, but I worked it out.

This is going to do wonders for my sanity. I was beginning to despair of the immense amount of stuff I was getting with my email address on it--stuff that wouldn't be caught by my rudimentary "filter everything that is bcc'd to me" method that was what I had relied upon up to now. My mailbox was getting increasingly cluttered, and it was hard to weed out the real stuff from the fake. I kept seeing "New message in inbox" and jumping to check it out...and finding it was just more spam. Hopefully, my inbox will be bright and clean and pristine from now on.

In other news, the family seems to have accepted my urge to travel in my own car, and will provide $25 in gas money for me. That's one fewer worry, at least.

Time to wander to bed, methinks.

Stuff. And other stuff.

compassrose prep proceeds apace. It's downright scary how well our ideas are meshing. I'm a little worried that ioianthe doesn't seem to be responding much, though. I'm sort of afraid we might steamroll right over her with our ideas if she doesn't get in some additional input...and I'd feel more reassured if I knew she was actually receiving the list at all.

This is a heck of a lot of fun.

Spamassassin continues to be working out very well. It's only hit a couple of false positives; I need to figure out how to tell it not to filter messages from certain people. When I get around to it. And it doesn't seem to catch klez mail very well, but then, I can deal with that easily enough.

Like the new background (if you're reading via my own page, not someone else's friends page)? I was fiddling around with modification methods and twigged on the one for adding a background image; I figured it would be better than just dull grey.

Watched the second episode of Farscape. It was pretty good; I can tell I'm going to enjoy the show.

Anyway, I should go and see about packing stuff up for eBay and Clie shipping. I probably won't; I'll end up procrastinating or something. Oh well, such is life...