Journal: News & Comment

Thanks, Telus!

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People have been complaining a lot about Telus, our local former telephone monopoly (it used to be B.C. Tel), but whatever they are using for their new spam control option simply rocks. Telus's FAQ doesn't specify exactly which technology the company uses to filter spam (probably to help avoid spammers' trying to get around it), but since I switched from tagging spam to deleting it yesterday, I've gone from receiving 15 spam messages per hour (for all the e-mail accounts I monitor) down to a fraction of that.

For instance, in the two hours since I last filtered mail this morning, I would typically have received 25 to 30 spam messages. Today I got two, only one of which came through my Telus account—something like a 95% reduction. My former university colleague, photographer Alastair Bird, reports similar results:

Amazing. I had three junk mail messages this morning. I can't remember the last time I had three junk mails. I also can't believe that Telus has come up with a program that *appears* to work properly and effectively, and costs me nothing.

Telus is locked in fierce competition with Shaw, the cable company, for high-speed Internet customers. This is one of the salvos, and it certainly will keep me as a Telus Internet customer, as I have been for almost six years, as long as it keeps working this well.

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