Admin - Thursday, December 6, 2007 11:54 - 4 Comments

Fighting Death by Spam

By Bob Walsh

There’s a special place in hell for people who ignore spam getting into their life and I’m in it.

Let me explain. I’ve been working this summer on Project X and largely neglecting my microISV’s tech support/defect system: while bugs and inquiries have gotten processed, since I set up my VB6 app to email bugs in, there are two email addresses that have been getting spam stuffed.

The app I’ve been using for years for this is Fog Creek’s FogBugz, and normally it does a fantastic job of sending spam right to the trash. But it needs to be taught which messages are spam and which are not. It’s not enough to just respond/resolve real cases - you’re supposed to move them out Undecided as either Spam or Not Spam.

Oops. My bad. Very, very 15,000 spam messages in my database bad.

In preparation for what I hope will be a great 2008, I’m shamelessly taking advantage of Fog Creek by moving from the hosted FogBugz service I’ve been using for the last year to Fog Creek’s very own hosted service. Not only does Fog Creek have a free startup/microISV option if you have 1-2 users, they were kind enough to move my db over to their servers for free (thanks Jason!).

But that still leaves me with 15,000 spam to kill - and Fogbugz is not designed to make this kind of user error easy to correct. So it’s Click All to select the 200 cases that are actually spam emails, scan them quick to make sure I haven’t missed any real cases along the way, click again to move them to Spam which I should have done when this started to become a problem wait for the server, and repeat. And repeat….

Only about 8,500 to go.

How’s your day going?

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