[Nottingham] Spam Filtering

[Michael Leuty]

On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 09:10, Duncan John Fyfe wrote:
> What is appropriate for business use and home use ?
> Ultimately, can spam be overcome by non-violent means and/or what steps could
> be taken to reduce/eliminate spam ?

Pertinent questions, which are troubling me greatly at present. My main
mailbox is deluged with spam. The ISP (CIX) provides "Greymail"
filtering, which has caught over 10,000 emails in the past 5 days.
However, well over 500 emails a day get through this preliminary screen.
I then have SpamAssassin set up to work with Evolution which filters out
about 60% of these. However it is very slow at processing them (it can
take 15 minutes to process 200 emails) which I assume is because it is
doing some reverse lookup. And despite all this I still have to delete
several hundred spam from my inbox folder every day. In short, filtering
is not working.

So until the Powers Wot Be get the spam problem sorted out I am
wondering about Challenge Response. I don't run an email server, I just
download mail from the mailbox at my ISP. A friend spoke highly of a
commercial firm called Spam Arrest (http://spamarrest.com) which does
the CR for you. It looks in your mailbox regularly, issues challenges
and makes mail that passes the test available to you on its own
mailserver. Drawbacks are (a) it costs $40 a year, (b) you have to
divulge your ISP mailbox details and password.

As an alternative, would it be practical for me to set up some software
(is it "fetchmail"?) to collect the mail from my ISP, run it through
TMDA on my machine, and then collect the autheticated mail using
Evolution?

(It sounds a bit tricky for this Bear of Very Little Brain.)

-- 
Michael Leuty <mike at leuty.net>