After moving our farm website over to bluehost.com I waw somewhat surprised to find out how much spam I was getting in the default account. It was way too much to delete manually and I was really short on time so I made an executive decision to enable Spam Assassin to start segregating the mail and pick up the pieces later. Enabling Spam Assassin was very easy with bluehost.com. I clicked a few buttons to select the default settings and off it went. I was not surprised to see it quickly put almost all the mail into the spam folder.
A few days later when I had more time I configured Mailwasher Pro to read the spam folder. Mailwasher Pro is my favorite tool to sift through spam for false positives and delete spam. I have trained Mailwasher to identify my “good” mail but I also use a combination of regex rules to catch the stuff that falls through the cracks. I sent a couple emails to myself from different email accounts and the good stuff is getting through and the bad stuff is getting diverted.
I have since looked at the statistics in Mailwasher Pro. Prior to the switch over I was deleting about 300 to 350 spam emails a day. After the switch over I had several days in which I deleted over 1000 spam emails a day. I am sure glad I am deleting this stuff on the mail server and not letting this junk steal my limited bandwidth.