[Nottingham] Spam Filtering

[Martin]

Michael Leuty wrote:
> 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
[... Spam stuff and commercial pay-to-clear notes ...]
> 
> 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?

Fetchmail -> Postfix is trivially easy.

You can then plug in all manner of spam and virus checkers/filters into 
postfix. The system also has the great advantage of hiding any ISP 
sluggishness for retrieving mail.

I then use courier-imap to let Mozilla locally play with my mail.

... Sounds like this is gearing up for two or three talks!

1: What tools/systems are available;
2: What people are currently doing and how effectively;
3: How to set up some of the best of the tools.
(4: How to target a personal thermonuclear device at the spam epicentre 
in Florida... (:-)) --- NOTE SMILEY ALERT!!! (;-))

Also, the fun debates can continue over a few beers.


Myself, I have a very good success rate just by being careful with where 
my email addresses go, not having promiscuous/careless contacts, and 
using Mozilla's baysian Junk trap.

I also use site specific return email addresses so that I can nuke 
whomever sources the dirty deed.

As mentioned previously, the archive for this list is pretty much the 
only place my main email address gets 'published'.

There's a LOT of spam stuff out there. Two interesting links for folk to 
chase are:

Why Am I Getting All This Spam?
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml

Anti-Spam Email Research
http://spamlinks.openrbl.org/prevent-research.htm


(Now, where's that asbestos suit and chobham armour?... (;-))

Have fun,
Martin


-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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