Building Sentrya – A New Approach to Tackling Spam
This is my first post here, and with this occasion I would like to share my journey as a new developer.
I dipped my toes in the startup world a few years ago, when I started FindMyData using no-code tools. I wanted to build something in data protection and spam protection industry, and unfortunately it took me over 2 years to figure out that I can’t fight spam with no-code.
I went through a pretty low period when I had to direction and felt helpless and disappointed. No job, no startup, no future, no money and no time since I was spending my days taking care of my daughter.
I took a pretty long break from all social media, and in March this year I made the leap and started learning to code. It definitely wasn’t easy. I had only 3 hours a day to focus on this, but I was determined to see this through.
As time went on, I began to feel more and more confident in my ability to code, and I started to split my time between learning and working on a way to stop spam.
Since I am a beginner, you can imagine how many bugs, errors and roadblocks I faced.
But by powering through, I made a very important discovery - there’s always a way to do something, and there’s always a workaround.
While looking for a way to combat spam, I found why spam filters often fail.
Spammers change their domains, titles, headers, and even the email’s body.
And it’s not always obvious. It can be a letter or even a number added or removed.
It’s no wonder that Google or Microsoft or other tech giants haven’t figured out a way to stop them.
But do you know what’s constant?
Legitimate emails.
So instead of chasing spammers and trying to keep up with their constant changes, I decided to use legitimate companies as a way to combat spam.
And this lead to the birth of Sentrya.
I made Sentrya to look through my emails, and extract the sender’s information (name, email and domain). This way, I’m able to display a list of companies that have my data, and a list of spammers found in my inbox (if the domain and the authentication don’t match, the sender is marked as spam).
Now, since I have the list of companies, I can select which senders I still want to receive emails from, and delete all other emails.
To see how well this works, a few weeks ago I let my inbox run wild, and didn’t delete any emails. After a week I had 247 emails in my inbox (a lot of useless junk), and 57 spam.
So I made my selection of legitimate companies (I included my bank and a few others).
It’s been 5 days since I implemented this, and I have only 20 emails in my inbox and 0 spam.
Don’t want to oversell this, but it works brilliantly!
I built Sentrya to help Gmail users get rid of spam and other useless promotions.
And if you or someone you know has a problem with spam in Gmail, I would like to invite you to join the waiting list at sentrya.net
I offer Sentrya for free, in exchange for feedback, a positive review if you’re happy with the results, and 30 minutes of your time to go through your spam list and help me find the legitimate companies that slipped through the cracks.
You can join the waiting list here - sentrya.net
Thank you for your time and attention, and I look forward to having you on.
Claudiu