[Gllug] Spam

[Chris Ball]

>>>>> "Harry" == Harry Jackson <Jackson> writes:

    Harry> Hi all Quite a while ago I got myself an email account with
    Harry> yahoo and deliberately named it a little bit obscure to avoid
    Harry> the obvious Spam.

Well, that's a bad start.  There are so many yahoo mail accounts that
spammers can just trawl the alphanumerics..

    Harry> I only accept mail from people in my address book.  I will
    Harry> only accept mail from people who have a keyword in the
    Harry> subject line.  Any missing or non qualified headers and the
    Harry> mail gets dropped.

Yuck.

    Harry> What is everyone else using to avoid Spam and how affective
    Harry> is the top mail servers at filtering it. I know there are
    Harry> some very fancy stuff out there to avoid Spam but are there
    Harry> any quick and dirty solutions to the avoid shit bar staying
    Harry> off line.

I run my own mail server, which helps; but the parts that do the magic
are Mail::SpamAssassin[1] and Razor[2].  SpamAssassin analyses the
content of your messages for spam-like qualities and adds up points for
each 'offence', rejecting a mail or moving it to a spam folder if it has
too many offences.

Offences are things like mentioning how to remove yourself from a list,
that you can make money fast, achieve success, etc, and also things like
broken mail headers, a host in ORBZ.  It's never missed a spam or struck
incorrectly for me, used in conjunction with ..

.. Razor, which takes a SHA-1 hash of your incoming e-mail and compares
it with a database of hashes that people have submitted as being of
spam.  If a spam is non-dynamic and just being thrown around all over
the place, chances are it'll be caught by Razor.

So, yeah.  Some of my mailboxes get lots of spam, but I really don't see
it anymore; it's all procmailed to =spam.  The most notable distinction
between my method and yours is that I never reject an e-mail from
someone, and there's no chance of a legimate message being returned.

Hope all this helps,

- Chris.

[1]:  http://www.spamassassin.org/
[2]:  http://razor.sourceforge.net/
-- 
$a="printf.net"; Chris Ball | chris at void.$a | www.$a | finger: chris@$a
         "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."


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