A bit of a grumpy old man post, but hey, it's got to be better than the normal link blogging.

Maybe it's one of the joys or disadvantages of being a white Englishman living in a predominantly white part of the country - I'm not being racist here, just stating facts - but the vast majority of my friends have traditional first, or dare I say it Christian, names.

Now the spammers don't know this, so the most of my spam email assumes I'm some unlucky fool in the midst Jesusland. Ergo, they expect that I'm the sort of chap who wouldn't be surprised at receiving an email from someone named Wilbur, Woodrow, Alicia, Teal, Traci, Jeremiah, Edgardo, Lorena or Romeo (a random selection of unknown names from my inbox). At best these names have great comedy factor to the English, and some simple whitelisting on sender names should reduce my spam by 90+%.

Now to see if I can persuade SpamAssassin to use this theory, and sorry but if you've got a misspelt or comedy first name you'll probably find your email to me will be heading straight to /dev/nul

Well, he asked for it.

For some perverse reason (testing I think), Frank Koehntopp wants people to send their spam to agathe.brauer@gmx.de Let me see, I suspect I might have a small amount of spam hanging around here...