Hey Jay.


On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 10:43:07AM -0500, Jay Stannard wrote:
[...]
> ISP uses Spamassassin, and I  set the threshold to aggressive and it
> hasn't helped.

Spamassassin is pretty damn good, in my experience. Maybe they're using
an old version, or perhaps even their "aggressive" settings aren't very?
Definitely try to contact them about the issue.


> 1) Filter the mail through a commercial webmail site like gmail. I found a
> place with instructions on how to do it here.
> http://mboffin.com/post.aspx?id=1636
> This still wouldn't make the webmail more functional

What would be the point, then? You don't get the really slick interface,
you don't get the privacy benefits of keeping your mail off Google
servers, you don't get the convenience benefits of having your mail
stored and backup up on Google's servers... The only thing you retain is
the domain name, it seems.


> 2) Load Thunderbird on a USB send it to her, and use the bayesan filter
> provided there to increase the spam filtering.
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Running_from_a_USB_drive_(Thunderbird)

I'm not personally a big fan of "portable apps", but that's just me. It
seems much more inconvenient than any webmail solution, though your
sister might not mind.


> Does anyone else have ideas? Ideas of what I should ask my ISP to do to
> filter spam?

Ask if they have the latest version. If you read up a bit on
Spamassassin settings, you can ask them about the specifics of what
heuristics they use and what weights they give them. For deadbox.ath.cx,
I scale the weighting of blacklists down (because they seem vulnerable
to abuse and pretty sketchy in general) and scale the Bayes filtering
way up (because I believe in a thing called math).


Good luck, let us know what you find!
-John