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Keep it simple, stupid

Posted on 16 May 2005 at 10:58

Davey Winder looks at cutting the spam reaching his BlackBerry, while thinking about laptop legs and compromising situations

The Internet is famous for its inconsistency, an example being the numerous TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that have more than three letters and more often than not aren't true acronyms anyhow. Some of them are still worth remembering even so, such as IMHO (In My Humble Opinion), IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) and MRDA (Mandy Rice Davies Applies). The latter, in case you were wondering, refers to Mandy's now historically famous dictum 'well he would say that, wouldn't he'. Perhaps my favourite - which I'm firmly placing at the core of my column this month - is KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Getting rid of spam is not as complicated as you, nor indeed I up until a couple of weeks ago, might have thought. Ever since I witnessed the birth of spam - fallout from the Canter & Siegel 'green card lottery' posting (see www.answers.com for the full story) that hit thousands of Usenet newsgroups on 5 March 1994 - I have been testing and implementing anti-spam solutions both for my own use and at clients' locations. These solutions have varied from simple blacklists, all the way through to complex heuristics, honey-traps and community-based P2P reporting systems. As regular readers will know, on the larger-scale server side of the fence, I tend to favour a Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam (www.symantec.com) approach, while at the lower end for a client-side solution I have found nothing that comes so close to a perfect balance of accurate spam-trapping and negligible false positives as InBoxer (www.inboxer.com).

But it was only recently, when faced with the challenge of setting up a BlackBerry 7100t using the BlackBerry web client rather than the easier-to-manage Exchange Server option, that the KISS principle came into play - and, even then, not immediately.

In theory, BlackBerry devices should be easy to set up. Simply go to the web-client page and point it at your POP3 mailbox, which is then polled via an always-on GPRS connection. Whenever new email arrives in your POP3 box, it is pushed out to your BlackBerry immediately. If there have been no new messages for 15 minutes then the device polls your mailbox, and if there is still nothing it decreases the polling frequency, in stepwise fashion until it reaches a two-hour interval - any new message kicks this process back to the start. This should work with all POP3 accounts, but unfortunately not all POP3 accounts are created equal. So it was that a distinctly KISS-unfriendly workaround had to be put in place when I discovered my own-hosted mailboxes couldn't be polled directly by the BlackBerry (it is a long story, involving my historical use of a 'virtual POP3' mail service, coupled with the inflexibility of BlackBerry's web-client setup interface that accepts only straightforward 'user@domain'-style email addresses rather than POP3 server names).

Anyhow, the point was that this problem forced some lateral thinking, and the easiest solution was to set up mail forwarding from my POP3 host to my Gmail account, which, thanks to the excellent POP download feature, could then be polled by the BlackBerry. Now things got really interesting, because doing this took my spam-filtering solution of choice - InBoxer 2 working within Outlook at the client end - out of the loop. Gmail has some rudimentary spam filtering, but alas not yet good enough to prevent plenty of the stuff from hitting the BlackBerry, and spam on such a small device is worse than spam clogging up your PC, not least because you are paying for all data sent to the device (although T-Mobile, as network operator, was chosen precisely to limit this).