A few fringe sites (yeah, I know someone will take offence at that, but really it's true) use an email filter system called "Waitlisting". The idea is that if you are a new sender, instead of delivering your email the system will send you back a notice that you've been waitlisted and ask you to go through a web verification process. Sometimes that's as simple as clicking a link, sometimes not. Until you do that your message will not be delivered.

Sounds like a great way to combat spam, right?

Until you're on the sending end. Here's a for-instance. I get hundreds of emails a day. I received a tech support email from someone about a free Android application that I wrote. I replied. I get "waitlisted."

I'd rather spend 5 minutes writing this blog post than go through his waitlisting policies to prove I'm really the guy that he already emailed.

As a system administrator it probably frustrates me more than others because I know there are other systems such as greylisting that are just as effective at reducing spam and don't inconvenience every person you want to communicate with.

Let me explain a bit about this graph.

First, our firewall has already chopped entire countries off from being able to access our mail server. Since I don't do business outside of the US, several major spam countries like China and Korea have been denied at the firewall. This reduced our inbound spam around 50%.

Next, I've implemented Greylisting. Greylisting stops about 98% of all of the spam that would otherwise hit our user's mailboxes.

The "Rejected" item in the above graph is partly a result of this greylisting. I can safely state that 99.99% of those messages are spam. With that in mind, you can see that we are blocking a huge quantity of spam at the server. This is spam that is never even accepted. The remaining rejected are triggered by one of the various Internet spammer blacklists that we use.

The "Spam" entry in the graph is the result of Spamassassin flagging probable spam.

Despite the entry for viruses, we aren't actually doing server side virus prevention as we're 99% Linux desktops.

To compare, only around 61,000 email messages were delivered by our server after filtering. That includes all outbound mail as well.

On a whim instead of just deleting my 1500 spam messages in GMail, I looked through the first page... and found 4 that weren't spam.

Wow. That's just from today. I thought I was getting less mail lately - I just assumed nobody loved me anymore.

I need to watch that more closely.