[thelist] The War on Sp*m

Kevin Martin evolt at brasscannon.net
Wed Apr 14 12:15:53 CDT 2004


Quoth Jennifer Johnson,

> Has anyone else seen a huge increase in the amount of spam in the last
> couple weeks?

It varies week by week, but yeah, it's past the point of absurdity.

> I'm now receiving on average 2 spam mails for every real mail
> I receive. And of course less than half of these are currently being picked
> up by spam assassin, which is what is installed by default on my server. 
> 
> Has anyone else used any of the other services for filtering out spam with
> any success? Death2Spam, or K9? Any other suggestions of something that
> works?

First, are you training your SpamAssassin as new spam comes in?

If you're using SA I'm assuming you have the ability to run procmail.
Try SpamBouncer (www.spambouncer.org). Keep it up to date and be
careful to white-list all of your friends; don't use it to delete any 
mail irretrievably except viruses.

SpamBouncer's effectiveness is mostly due to its aggressive 
hand-tuned recipes, which are not compatible with the SpamAssassin 
philosophy of automation.  I spend almost four years accumulating
my own .procmailrc (http://handsonhowto.com/pmail101.html), but I
replaced it with SpamBouncer a couple of months ago and haven't
looked back.



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