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Dealing with spam

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bscott:
Having lurked here for a while it is time for me to emerge from the shadows and say hello, wish you all a Happy New Year and give my thanks to those who make this forum the great place that it is. (A few credits on the way to mouser).

Can I ask how people are dealing with Spam?

I have found Cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com/desktop/) a very effective solution on the desktop - see Tech Support Alert review  here http://www.techsupportalert.com/reviews/review-cloudmark.htm.

Cloudmark works fine for me on Thunderbird which I have just adopted in place of Outlook but I need to catch spam at my mail server for when I use the Roundcube client.

I have just set up Exim4+SpamAssassin on  Debian Etch  but a lot of spam is getting through on the default settings - I will need to spend some time finding out how to tweak it.

I would be interested in other peoples experience in dealing with Spam on the desktop and at the server.

Regards,

Bob Scott

f0dder:
Humm, for thunderbird I personally just use the built-in junk marking thing, works fine enough for me.

Anyway, at the mail server side I would implement greylisting. It works by actually rejecting mails(!) whenever you get mail from a new domain, but instead of whitelisting (where you would then have to manually add the domain, quite tedious!) it relies on SMTP servers re-trying the send as per the SMTP specification.

I haven't seen any instances where valid mail doesn't get through, and it's pretty effective in blocking spam, since most spammers don't use fully-fledged SMTP servers that retry, they use shotgun tactics to try and reach as many as possible rather than reliably delivering to each recipient.

I haven't set up such a system yet myself, but I plan on moving to in-house mailhosting at the museum I do admin work for, using Dovecot and postfix. And of course with greylisting.

yksyks:
I'm using for a quite long time SpamPal (freeware) on a dedicated server (rather old computer running Win2000) with the last freeware version of a mail server 602Lan Suite. SpamPal combines several filter techniques using plugins, which is inevitable nowadays, including RegEx, Bayesian, collaborative filtering and others. It also uses public blacklists, which are becoming more and more unreliable. Very useful is an automated whitelist, i.e., all persons you write to are automatically whitelisted. Manual black- and whitelists are of course available, too.

The program unfortunately lacks any further development due to serious health problems of its author, however, it still runs almost perfectly. It takes some time to tweak it properly according to your spam profile. There's also an inevitable period of time spent on teaching the Bayesian filter, but this all applies to all similar applications. I'm doing this management using RealVNC, but after some time there's almost no need to touch it.

Also promising might be Spamato, does anyone have any experience?

Carol Haynes:
fOdder that's an interesting idea - but can you set it up to do it on a per email basis rather than domain name?

The reason I ask is that a lot of spam comes from common domain names (usually ISP domain names or common free webmail sites such as Yahoo and Hotmail). Mostly these are spoofed email address sources and so it is difficult to track down the actual source. Greylisting by domain name would only have partial success on the constant stream of crap I receive as a lot of the domains would have been automatically whitelisted by genuine emails being sent from the same domain name.

If you could do this you would effectively only have email coming from addresses from serious senders (or spammers that do respond to bounces).

FWIW I use POPfile as my filtering method of choice. It is very effective and a lot more flexible than pure spam filtering tools as you can use it to effectively set up intelligent rules to sort or label incoming email. It works with any POP client for windows and on any other operating system that supports PERL and is open source. See http://popfile.sourceforge.net

Edit/Update: Just looking at the latest release of POPfile it now supports IMAP (probably did before but I didn't notice it). I also see it support NNTP - which is a very interesting idea! POPfile has been at early release numbers (last version was 0.22.5) but in December came of age at version 1.0. Whooppee

tinjaw:
I use Tuffmail as my email hosting provider. I can't recommend them enough. Small shop. One man, I believe. Customer service is excellent. Their feature set is top notch. I have very little problem with spam. One of the nicest thing is that it is so easy to do server side spam rejection. I'm talking checkbox easy! What gets through that then must run the gauntlet of Spam Assassin. By default you have three Inboxes: Inbox, Junkmail, and Discard. These are basically your green, yellow, and red. I don't keep track, but I can't get any more than one or two true spam emails in my inbox. Things that have passed the gauntlet but still look a bit fishy go in Junkmail. If somebody sent me a legitimate email and I didn't get it in my ebox, this is usually where it is. The stuff in Discard is five nines spam. I use the web front end (imp3/4, squirrelmail, and they're testing Roundcube (AJAX). Everything I do with them is secured, which matters when I connect through my workplace. They even have LDAP address book support. When at home I connect using Thunderbird via IMAP.

I don't get any kickbacks. I am just a fanboy customer. They have a 30 Day free trial plus a 30 day money back guarantee. I think this is where I am supposed to say, "You can't afford NOT to try it!!!"  :greenclp:



I almost forgot to mention that Sieve filtering comes with every address as well.

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