Spam Overload

I had almost fifty spam messages this weekend. Of these, a dozen were the same message, with an image advertising Viagra and Cialis from "ED Medicine Chest." Since these are all coming from different addresses, I have to assume these are Windows zombies. An additional eight or nine were in Cyrillic or Japanese. There were a handful of other duplicated messages.

I have spam filtering via my host, but it does not seem to be very effective. DreamHost provides a configurable installation of SpamAssassin with a user interface that seems to be part of the SquirrelMail webmail interface. I seem to have access to only two parameters, one of which controls the likelihood that a message will be flagged, which is not of interest to me, and another that changes the likelihood that a message will be held in quarrantine.

Only a scant handful of these messages are caught in the filter. My attempts to change the setting away from the default value, either increasing it or decreasing it, always seem to result in less, not more, spam caught in the filter.

At this point I would actually like to move to a whitelist, with everything else held in quarrantine for my occasional review. It's gotten that bad.