[Gllug] Whitelist-only spam filtering

[Jake Jellinek]

On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 11:48, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> 1) I'm not talking about lettings some shadowy third party filter my
>    mail.

I agree totally, and I find Vapul's Razor most bizarre in that I can't
really seem to find out any details about it, but then I still consider
a third party opinion worth considering and adding to the score, even if
you configure it to have a very low score difference one way or the
other. (You can in fact configure Spam Assassin to ignore all third
party input of course)

  I'll do that and maintain the filters myself.  I'm convinced
>    that whitelists are the only way forward and, if implemented
>    correctly, will not result in lost mail.

Depends of course on the type of mailbox and mail you are getting, I'm
using this not so much only on my personal mail as on mail boxes such as
hostmaster@ and sales@ etc. In these, a large portion of mail comes from
new addresses anyway.

> 2) Spamassassin isn't good enough.  I get far to many false-positives
>    and it lets through stacks of spam -- notably recently have been
>    the classic Nigerian scams.
> 

Not my experience, although I did get a variation of that Nigerian scam
through. As I say, with mailboxes which have 80% spam and 20% real mail
and new addresses coming in a lot of the time, I can't see whitelists
working, so I guess the type of mail and use of the mailbox have to be
taken into account.

> However, the Spamassassin approach is good.  I like the idea of
> scoring and that would be useful for the stuff that isn't in the
> whitelists or is in a provisional whitelist.
> 

Yup, you can always just score it anyway, and not filter in or out
anything (scoring can go into the headers rather than the body, which is
the default way it seemed to install and was horrible).

Cheers,

Jake.



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