[thelist] The War on Sp*m

J.D. Welch so.there at showtunepink.com
Wed Apr 14 12:25:21 CDT 2004


on 14 Apr Jeniffer C. Johnson wrote:

JCJ >Has anyone else seen a huge increase in the amount of spam in the last
JCJ >couple weeks? I'm now receiving on average 2 spam mails for every real mail
JCJ >I receive. And of course less than half of these are currently being picked
JCJ >up by spam assassin, which is what is installed by default on my server.

i was having the same crappy success with spamassassin, and it turned
out to be the (logical) problem that the version of same running on the
mailserver was several versions behind.  at my request, it was upgraded
to 2.60 and it's now catching probably 95% of spam via it's internal
mechanisms, the bayesian filtering and the razor blacklist features--
make sure your sysadmin turns everything on!-- that was another problem
with the older installation.  i do get a number of false positives, but
the ratio is so small (maybe 1 out of 500 messages) that i'm willing to
take the time and whitelist those addresses by hand in spamassassin's
user_prefs file...

so, i guess the moral is, spamassassin is acutally very useful if
installed correctly and updated regularly.  talk to your friendly local
sysadmin and see if both these things are true.

JCJ >Has anyone else used any of the other services for filtering out spam with
JCJ >any success? Death2Spam, or K9? Any other suggestions of something that
JCJ >works?

before my laptop died recently, i was combining server side filtering
with the bayseian junk filters built into Apple Mail, which reduced spam
in my inbox to nothing, with about 100 messages/day caught by the
filters.

-jd

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