I seem to be getting tons of junk mail.<p>I’d like to find some modern solution to help so I don’t miss important emails.<p>So I’m wondering where is the anti spam software at these days? Is it a field that is active? Are the solutions like spam assassin out of date or still the best available?
I can't answer your question as asked, but I thought I would give you some information. Here is my setup.<p>I wrote a system that runs on my home server. Every 20 minutes it logs into my email, downloads everything it hasn't previously seen. Then I have an allowlist and a blocklist to perform an initial classification.<p>Everything else has a Bayesian Spam Filter run on it.<p>Anything from the blocklist or scoring 98% likely to be spam is deleted from the server. Everything scoring <98% is put in the grey bucket.<p>I never see things on the blocklist.<p>I read things on the allowlist.<p>I skim things in the grey bucket ... it's rare that anything is spam, but those that are go in the block-bucket. Everything goes in the allow-bucket.<p>Then I use the block-bucket and allow-bucket to update the filter's settings, and anything that ended up in the block-bucket is deleted from the server.<p>It wasn't much work to set up, very little spam gets through, and it's bespoke, so no one else sees my email. The downside is that I can't benefit from other people's work in classifications, and they from mine, but it's solid, secure, and effective.<p>(Some specific details omitted for brevity and clarity of exposition)
One thing I do know is that if there is an open source spam filter which is widely used, serious spammers will put their spam through it to see if it gets through.