[Techtalk] Spam solutions

Robert Wichert robert at wichert.org
Wed Aug 18 19:55:10 EST 2004


OK, first of all, this involves both Linux and Windows.

For linux mail servers, we have had good luck with RBL refusal, plus no
default delivery.  .redirect default|/dev/null is the way to go.

For Windows, I have used Steven with good results, but once the number
of Spam messages get into the thousands, he is overwhelmed.

Robert Wichert


===============================

jennyw wrote:
> 
> Spam is getting out of hand. Okay, it got out of hand a while ago, and now
> I'm finally getting around to going to the next level. Just wondering what
> interesting anti-spam solutions people have had good experiences with.
> 
> The main thing I do right now is leave my main e-mail account unfiltered,
> look through it for good messsages, then run a Perl script that connects to
> my IMAP server and moves all the messages not on my approved address list to
> a new folder, where, theoretically, I scan messages once more.  This way, I
> should get at least one look at all my messages before filtering.  Previous
> to this, I tried using spamassassin with my Perl script, too, but I found it
> took way too long to run on the several hundred spam messages I get a day,
> and I also found that spamassassin has had false positives and also misses a
> lot of spam. On my other accounts (like my mailing list account, aka this
> one) I use Procmail for filtering, and send all unrecognized e-mail to
> spamassassin (same problem as with the Perl script, but without the
> slowness). Of course, I also established a new e-mail account that doesn't
> get any spam, but I kind of feel like that's giving up.
> 
> Right now I'm ready to try the Bayesian filters, but I haven't had much
> experience with them and I've read several people say that spamassassin's
> Bayesian filtering isn't great.
> 
> I'm now trying out the IMAP filter that comes with spambayes, which is
> written in Python. The training takes forever (training 1,000 messages can
> take more than a couple hours on my Athlon Thunderbird 800 Mhz system).
> Filtering takes a while, too, if you try to throw a couple thousand messages
> at it, but for small numbers of messages, it's fairly speedy (it's odd -- it
> seems like the time to process messages increases geometrically based on the
> number of messages you throw at it at a given time).  I like that this is in
> Python, because I'm starting to use Python for most of the stuff I used to
> use Perl for, but I'm not sure about the efficacy of this solution yet,
> though, and I can't find much info (aside from their site) that talks about
> how well it works. Also, this is the only Bayesian filter I know of that has
> an IMAP filter.
> 
> The other product I'm looking at is DSPAM. This looks really promising. The
> problem is that I don't know how easy it will be to send messages to it for
> training. If anyone has experience with it, I'd love to hear about it,
> though, including how you decided to set it up.
> 
> FYI, I run Debian testing, postfix, courier-imap, and procmail. I use
> fetchmail to pick up e-mail (so there probably wouldn't be a point to using
> RBL -- also, I'm not sure about how much real e-mail those might block), but
> there's one I leave on the ISP server (in case my computer goes down), which
> is the one I use the filtering Perl script for. The e-mail clients I use are
> mutt (Linux), Mozilla Thunderbird (Mac OS X), and Outlook Express (Windows).
> 
> The greylisting that Andrea mentioned recently looks every interesting, too,
> although I'd be curious how it works with things like TDMA (I've thought
> about implementing TDMA, too, but I'm hesitant due to the potential
> annoyance factor). If anyone has experience with greylisting, in particular
> using postfix, that'd be great. I'd be open to switching to exim, too, but
> I'd be a bit concerned about switching to sendmail (it scares me).
> 
> Anyone want to share their adventures in spam?
> 
> Jen
> 
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