For the past couple of weeks, my company's mail server has been struggling to deal with unprecedented quantities of spam. Between renewed efforts by spammers, bounce messages generated by email servers rejecting messages spoofed with our addresses and containing a spreading virus, and normal traffic, it's constantly grinding away just to keep up with the load. SpamAssassin isn't flagging enough of them for me.
Spammers are a perfect specimen of a virus. They exist even though no sane and rational individual wants them around (except their fellow support group members). They adapt to an increasingly aggressive and hostile "working" environment. They develop and deploy new methods to reach their goal. And since the dawn of the first spam message, their numbers have only increased.
To combat the amount of spam that has been slipping through in to our Inboxes, we switched over from POP3 to IMAP to take advantage of MDaemon's ability to learn from spam that gets through its filters. IMAP is different from POP3 in that the whole intent of it is for mail to remain on the server making your email 100% portable while still giving you the ability to use the mail client of your choice (provided they support the IMAP protocol). You can have public and private directories for categorization of mail, all done on the server. This is where the use of IMAP in combating spam comes in to play.
There are public IMAP folders for all users on our mail server where users can place email that gets in to their Inbox that should have been flagged as spam. There's another one for mail that was marked as spam that shouldn't be. Every night, MDaemon processes these messages and learns from to be more effective in its filtration process. In theory (and practice), your mail server becomes a better front line defense in combating spam.
That's all find and dandy, but it also dropped a bombshell on me. My mail client of choice for the past 6 months or so has been PocoMail. I switched over after Outlook Express went on a crashing binge for a few weeks and pushed me over the edge. I was quite happy with PocoMail, although the recent release of v3.0 has seriously disappointed me. It got slower, more cumbersome, and less intuitive. It also added IMAP support. Unfortunately for me, it's very rudimentary and is horribly incomplete. It's so bad, that I have no choice but to change email clients.
So, my search has begun once again. I tried Mozilla Thunderbird and was impressed enough to convert to it on my home machine, but it's lacking a few key features for usage at work. I can't stand Eudora either. Migrating email clients is a huge project for me since I have a lot of email accounts, loads of messages, and a very organized filing structure. Unfortunately, I think I may have no choice but to go back to Outlook Express. Even worse, its horrid importation process refuses to import PocoMail... :-/