From: "Janina Sajka" <janina@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 2:56 PM Subject: Re: pine > spamassassin is a great anti-spam bot. Only real downside, is that you > do have to receive the spam locally before spamassassin can dispose of > it, but it does work well. I see only about 10-12 spams a day, and I get > several hundred emails a day. I've set up Exim to do several things which help in defeating spam. Probably my 2 favourites are a reverse dns look-up, so, for example, if the spammer is using an ip address that has not been allocated, the message gets rejected before sending, and a callback function, where let's say the From address that is sent is spammer at abc.com, Exim looks up the mx record for abc.com (rejecting the connection if it cannot find one), then contacts the mail exchanger for abc.com and tries to start an smtp dialog. It sends a helo, a From and a To, using spammer at abc.com as the addressee. If the mail exchanger gives a 550 indicating that spammer is an invalid user, Exim draws the conclusion that spammer is a fake user and ends the smtp session with a 550 error. > My spamassassin is configured to throw spam into its own mail folder, > premarked for deletion. Ocassionally, I go in there and look to see if > some message was put there erroneously. I haven't found any errors in > the past months, and I'm always amazed at how many messages are there, > when I do look. And, when I leave the folder, they're all gone, because > they've already been marked for deletion, and my ua is set to delete on > folder exit. I just bin them, I was keeping them for a while but when I had no false positives in about 3 months I decided against it as the large volume of spam was making it time-consuming. Hth Toby
