Spam's being beaten at last

Just about every e-mail address on the AIB domain is extensively spammed. It's grown to such a proportion that we've been testing a number of spam filters to try and solve the ever-growing problem.

After a fairly rigorous set of tests, we settled on Spamfighter, a collaborative programme that makes use of the wisdom of the crowd - the Spamfighter community - to identify and remove spam from users' computers. It's a simple application that you can download and will remove spam from every e-mail account that you have on a PC. If one slips through the net, you simply press "Block" on the e-mail program and the spam item is moved to the Spamfighter folder, and the Spamfighter central database is updated. It seems to work incredibly effectively.

In fact, I took a look at the Spamfighter statistics today. Since we applied the "paid for" version of the program in July, the system has filtered well over 40,000 spam e-mails. Yes, 40,000+. That's the scale of the problem this small but international organisation faces. Horrific.

Then I realised that the spam problem was transferring itself to my newly-acquired Blackberry. I'd resisted getting one of these devices for a long time, thinking that it was simpler to deal with e-mails in the office, but the trouble when you travel quite a bit is there's a constant backlog that slows down your return. So I got a Blackberry before going on holiday in July. Trouble was, using the Blackberry Desktop Redirector every item of mail arriving was automatically forwarded as the Redirector worked instantly, before Spamfighter could kick in.

I searched high and low for a solution and today have found it. Thanks to a post on www.slivka.com (dating back to 2004) I found a registry edit that allows you to put in a delay on the Redirector. Despite not liking tampering with the registry, I duly followed the instructions and, hey presto, the Redirector is delayed by 30 seconds giving Spamfighter ample time to work. So, no more spam on the Blackberry. Great.

Here's the registry edit instructions to save you looking:
Step 1. Go to Start > Run and type "regedit" and click OK.
Step 2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software >Research In Motion > BlackBerry > Redirector. Change the value of the ProcessMailDelay entry to 30. If this value fails to address the issue, then modify the value to be 60.
Note: If the ProcessMailDelay value is not present, create it as a DWORD Value and set the Value data to Decimal 30.
Step 3. close the Redirector and Desktop Manager applications, then restart both to force these changes to take effect.

Good luck!