Re: the problem of spam

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 05:15:43PM -0600, Danny Sauer wrote:
> At the meeting last night, Steve pointed out that he's rejecting 45% of 
> the email on a particular server.

49% actually.

> That's terrible.

Tell me about it.  :-)

> The mail server here at work's more terrible, though. :) Last month, I
> rejected 88% of the incoming mail as spam.

I like using that particular example I showed last night because it
seems about as scientific a sample as you are going to find around
here, at almost a million messages per month.

I have a similar setup at a small-ish ISP down south...  I should run
that script there sometime.  In a month or so I should have some
interesting numbers here too.

> This, BTW, is the result of rejecting everything from Korea, some
> other known spammers, postfix filtering out bad HELO addresses, bad
> local addresses, etc, and everything spamassassin thinks is spam (for
> 4 of our heaviest users, with a threshold of 5 for all but me - I run
> a threshold of 4 and have had 1 false positive in the last 6 months,
> but that one really did look like spam).

Interesting.  I have the threshold there set to 10, which is probably
why we're "only" rejecting 49% at the moment.  I should probably crank
it down a few notches...  I have the threshold here set to
amavisd-new's default of 6.3, and so far that's working well enough
for me.  (The volume of spam has gone down so much in the last couple
of days since I put my new mail server into production that it is just
scary.)

> --Danny, who finds this interesting and very bothersome, all at the same 
> time

Ditto.

BTW, I mentioned this at last night's meeting, but I thought I should
mention it again here...  If you run Fedora, and you'd like to install
amavisd-new, I have a package built (and all the prerequisites).  Let
me know if you are interested.  (Right now you'll have to figure out
most of the details for yourself, but I'll get something nice written
up as soon as I have time.)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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