[wplug] SpamAssassin

Lance Tost ltost at pobox.com
Sat Apr 3 16:38:19 EST 2004


On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Bill Moran wrote:
> I'm not a big fan of _any_ content filter for a number of reasons:
> 1) It's like painting over the rust.  Someone out there is junkmailing you
>     (either viruses or spam), block it at the source

In an ideal world, this may be possible.  

> 2) It puts you in a constant game of "block something, then they work out
>     a way around it".  How many spams have you seen with v1agra in the text,
>     in an attempt to fool content filters like spam assassin?  I'm just not
>     interested in playing that game.

Nobody's interested in playing this game.  But what can you do?

> 3) While sa is OK on CPU usage, it's high compared to actually blocking the
>     source of the problem.  It's also time-consuming, look at the length of
>     time it takes to process your messages once sa is in the loop.  This is
>     probably of little concern when you have a small mail server with only
>     a few dozen addresses, but it loads a big, corporate server badly.
> 

Explain to me how to block the source of the problem.  Where I work, we 
block about 8,000-10,000 messages a day out of probably 12,000-15,000 
total using PureMessage (a commerical product based somewhat on 
Spamassassin).  Out of these spam messages, typically no more than 10-15 a 
day come from the same IP.


-- 
Lance Tost <ltost at pobox.com>




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