[SC.LUG] Re: Exciting news

[Adrian Wontroba]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 08:15:52AM +0000, Andrew Hutchings wrote:
 
> That is a bit of a low score base to be working with, for example genuine eBay 
> and Paypal messages can score higher than 5 unless you have tuned your rules.

I've about 70 procmail rules to sift out real ebay postings, "safe"
mailing lists etc before spam filtering, and some after.

I have occasionally checked from addresses and subjects in the spam
dump, and never noticed anything which didn't deserve to be there,
either because it was spam or produced by a brain-dead HTML mailer,

> My server filters anything 5 or more into a spam box and anything that clamav 
> detects into a virus box.  These 2 get around 200 a day between them for my 5 
> main domain names (it filters more for my wife and she only uses 1 domain 
> name), a few slip the net but that is mainly because I am currently 
> retraining the bayesian filter.

I get around the same volume of spam. Plus much more unwanted mail when a
spammer has decided it is my turn to be in the reply-to barrel.

Still, one of my worst mail experiences was when I was on a free dialup
UUCP feed (just cost me local calls), with trailblazer modems, when a
mailing list "rang" (not my fault I hasten to add). My feed site admin
went to a lot of trouble to track me down to say that they'd had to
ditch tens of thousands of emails which had appeared in a couple of
hours and were jamming up their local corporate system. It was coming
in very rapidy (the feed site being part of one of the very big comms
companies), and draining down a POTS line very slowly.

Others include causing an ISP some grief when I went away for a few
weeks and my own mail system crashed (power problems), all was well
until I returned, when their system got quite upset when it tried to
deliver; and recently loosing a months worth email locally when a
machine died and its backups proved to be less good than they should
have been. Most embarrasing. Shades of Sledge Hammer's "Trust me, I know
what I'm doing" moto.

-- 
Adrian