Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam

I use what would be considered a “belt and braces” approach in the UK.

I actually get a lot of spam, as years ago I had lots of e-mail addresses in my web site. All are now encoded with JAVA, but it doesn’t stop people using old lists. Typically, I’ll get about 3-400 unwanted messages a day.

I use a standard virus processor like McAfee, which I find works well and quarantines the messages correctly. Or at least I haven’t had a virus get through for some years.

But in my case, I pre-filter everything with a free program called POPFILE. This uses a sophisticated Bayesian filter to categorise all of my messages. For instance this post is the same as an E-Mail I sent to LED-Digest. Replies from this list automatically get tagged as led_digest and put into the right folder in Outlook. POPFILE uses every word in the message to do the tagging and thus as these messages always come with the same dependable headers, led_digest scores very highly.

But the main beauty of POPFILE is that nearly all spam and viruses get identified before going to McAfee. They get quarantined and then I arrange for them to go straight to the Deleted Items folder. A quick scan of this where I order everything by subject, followed by a bulk delete, and that is usually all I do with spam and viruses.

As my business is data analysis of all sorts, I have analysed this approach in detail and find it only gives the occasional false negative and very few false positives.