gushue.net

Wow, two posts in the same day :) Although, this entry is what I had orginally intended to write earlier, but got sidetracked by my hatred of spam.

Since I was off work last night, and rather bored, I was just browsing around various sites. I remembered that there is now a Telus store here now, for their cell phone service. So I took a look at their phones and plans.

Now, I have a cell phone (Nokia 5160) already. But it’s quite useless for me now, since it’s on the Rogers AT&T network – which has no coverage here. I had it while I was in Halifax a couple of years ago. It’s a nice phone. Pretty basic, but hey, it’s just a phone. I also have a PDA (Palm m125, although I’d like to get a Palm Tungsten T3) for those other features ;)

Since there is finally digital coverage here in Corner Brook, I’m somewhat interested in having a cell phone. Not that I have a real need for it – I just refused to even think about having one here without digital service. Some of the available plans aren’t too bad (like the Atlantic EW 20 plan), but I’m not so sure about the phones. I’m not a huge fan of the phones that flip open, but I suppose those are becoming more common than not these days. Most of the phones they have on their page are just too damn ugly. Or have lots of useless crap I don’t want (PDA functionality, mostly). Or are refurbished. No Nokia phones at all either. But maybe the LG models might be good. The LG 4600 and LG TM520 seem ok. They do have a lot of cheap, decent quality, things these days. Of course, they make pretty much every kind of electronic device.

Maybe I’ll get one later in 2004. In the spring/summer, when I’m more likely to go somewhere. I hate winter, and I hate going too far when it’s cold and snowing :)

Since the beginning of this year, I have been tracking the amount of spam that SpamAssassin has been filtering. It’s sickening how much spam comes in daily. At the moment, it’s probably averaging around 300 spams/day. And that’s not counting how much my server rejects before it even gets to SpamAssassin. And it’s only mail for three people – myself and my parents.

The graph for October is lower, because between Oct 15 2003 and Nov 15 2003 (or about that long, not sure exactly), my mail server was down and wasn’t tracking the spam. But that also means that the graph for November is only for the last half of the month. I figure that it would have reached 6000 or more. At the rate it’s going now, I wouldn’t be surprised if 9000+ spams got filtered this month.

Thanks to a lower threshold than default (4.0 instead of 5.0), and Bayesian filtering (see the Wikipedia entry for more information), I haven’t gotten any false positives for some time now. And only the occasional false negative. But I just feed those to sa-learn and all is good.

Note that I have modified SpamAssassin slightly to do the actual tracking of spam. Right now, I haven’t really publicly released my small change, but I’ve given it to people that have asked. I’ll have to properly release it in the future. Along with the code generating the graphs on my page.

I really don’t know how people can manage to read non-filtered email.