Specifically, I’m referring to the K9 spam filter.  One of my missions when I went home for Thanksgiving was to quench the flow of spam into my mother’s inbox.  She had been complaining about hundreds of messages showing up whenever she would check her email.  At first I thought it was just that she was only checking it every few weeks.  When I got home I found out that this is the daily spam count.  Because she’s had that email address for over 5 years, and it’s simple and easy to guess, she gets over 100 spam emails per day. 

Since she’s not very computer literate I had to come up with some system where she could keep her email address and not have to do a lot of configuration or other work to filter out the spam.  I installed K9 and trained the filters (there was certainly an abundance of spam to train it on) and set up whitelists for people she commonly receives email from so their emails won’t chance getting accidentally classified as spam.  I also set up a filter in her email program that moves the email marked by K9 as spam into a spam folder.  I told her to check that folder every so often to make sure nothing good was in there and then delete it all.  I also showed her how to train the filter if it accidentally classified a good email as spam.  I hope that she will remember how all this stuff works.  It’s mostly transparent, but there is the possibility that it will mark good mail as spam and she’ll have to mark it as good in K9’s interface.