We recently returned from our summer holiday in France - for the record the Vosges is a very pretty part of France and well worth a visit. Upon our return the door mat was covered with junk* mail and my email in box was overflowing with spam.
Alas I missed Matts Radio interview on the topic, but it's certainly a hot topic at the moment, there is even a perfectly timed article about email filtering over on perl.com.
I've recently come to the conclusion that over 95% of my email is spam, and I no longer need an email client, all I need is a spam shredder.
What I really hate about spam, is that like many people in the UK I pay for my connect time, and on a V90 modem, it's painfully slow and expensive, so even downloading spam to my client then filtering it, is time consuming and painful. Thankfully I have Eudora set to only download 16k per message, which cuts a lot of HTML junk email out for a start, but it's still not perfect.
My ISP isn't running a sophisticated Mail filtering solution, so until I upgrade my client systems to Linux/Unix I need a temporary solution. What I'm thinking of doing is making a very simple interactive command line tool that scans my POP3 email box, lists the title and sender only, and allows me to delete them without pulling any of the body message down. I can then run that once a day when I get home from work to catch most of the worst junk, then use my normal email client for the rest of the evening.
All I need to do this should be Net::POP3, Term::ReadKey and Mail::Header, a few lines of code and that should be enough. I don't actually want it to filter the email directly - that's what SpamAssassin et al. are for.
* Actually we don't get much junk mail since we signed up with the DMA, but my partner still gets some, and the pervious occupants get plenty...
