Spam and mailing lists

[Darrell Michaud]

I'm now using postfix + blacklists + spamassassin in daemon mode for
server side filtering. I've found that the blacklists are moderately
effective, the strict verification rules you can put into postfix are very
effective, and spamassassin out of the box is not that effective.

On the client side (via procmail), I use spamassassin with bayesian
analysis, and razor. Razor is still very effective, but I worry that it
will not always be so. It's possible to put razor on the server side with
postfix, but not as easy as it really should be. I haven't done this yet
because my site doesn't need it. I'm surprised that external filtering
doesn't feel like it was part of the primary design any major MTA. With
Sendmail (een with milters) and Postfix it feels from a sysadmin view like
an add-on hack.

Not much gets through past this as a percentage, but enough does to be
mildly annoying. Sometimes I'll get a "Spam of consciousness", which looks
like randomly generated poetry, without any kind of link or discernable
sales pitch. Other times there's some stock scam that looks like a
personal email but with a stock trading name thrown in somewhere.

Some days a whitelist system sounds very tempting.




Python said:
> On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 07:26 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
>> On 10/16/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hello, world!
>>
>>   I'm a bit surprised we haven't heard from any Postfix or qmail fans
>> in this thread.  Perfect holy war folder here, people, come on.  :)
>>
>>   Ha ha, only serious.  I've got someone that's got my half-way
>> convinced that Exim is better than a pastrami sandwich, but nothing on
>> the other two popular MTAs.
>
> I'm running fedora 3 with (I think) defaults: postfix, mailman, amavisd-
> new which includes spamassassin.  Hooking up amavis required some minor
> config file edits.  Heavy lifting was provided by the packagers and yum.
> It blocks about 80% of the total spam coming through.  I assume some
> tweaking could improve that, but I rely on spambayes with my email
> client to filter the rest.
>
> Bill McGonigle's changes to his server
> 	bfccomputing.com (Postfix)
> have eliminated spam from the python-talk list.  I used to delete 3 - 10
> spams per day.
>
>>
>>   "Opinions are like anuses.  Everybody has one, and they all stink."
>>
>> -- Ben
>> _______________________________________________
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>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
> --
> Lloyd Kvam
> Venix Corp
>
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>