Got spam?

A number of people I've talked to have noticed that their SPAM volume has increased over the last month to 6 weeks. We aren't sure if it's due to the recent Spamhaus legal activity, or just a natural increase in traffic. But frankly, I'm sick of it. Better than 80% of my incoming messages are SPAM now. I've had to redirect our family domain's catchall address to my GMail account, but that hasn't helped much, as I am getting a lot of junk to legitimate addressed too.

We don't have SpamAssassin on our mail host, but I've been thinking about asking whether it can be installed.

I wish it was easier to apply simple filtering rules, but that really requires that senders take extra steps. Things like GPG-signing or encrypting messages would go a long way. SPAMmers won't take the time (or may not even be able to) GPG-sign messages, so if everyone signed legit email, we could just filter anything that isn't signed. This would be a huge anti-phishing advantage for financial institutions as well - if it's not signed, they didn't send it, so don't click anything. I'd gladly give my banks my public key so they can send me 100% encrypted email, to make things that much more secure. I know that financial institutions know about GPG/PGP, as I know of several which use the technology to securely send system-generated email for transaction data. Getting that message through to Customer Service, however, is a chore.

Alas, I seem to know at most 4 people who understand and would actually apply GPG measures on their email. It's not terribly difficult to understand, really. And there are tools out there like Windows Privacy Tools to help make working with it easier.