[wplug] OT Spam Filtering

[Michael Semcheski]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:03 AM, DK <wplug at curlynoodle.com> wrote:
> Sorry for the off-topic post, but I need a better spam filter for
> Outlook.  I used SpamBayes for awhile, and even made a donation to PSF
> early on.  However, in recent months it made Outlook very unstable and
> even worse of an application than MS intended.  Anyone have experience
> with SpamAid, SpamBully, or have another suggestion?

I'll just list my experience here which probably isn't compatible with
what you are doing, but may give you some ideas.  This is my first
mail server, and I'm glad it is working well now.

When someone tries to send me an email (via exim), there are a few
sanity checks that go on first.  Is there reverse DNS for the sending
SMTP server?  Is everything well formed and in compliance with the
relevant RFC's?  If not, the message gets greylisted and usually dies
there.  If the mail server retries while the message is greylisted, it
gets delivered.  Usually the spammers give up easilly.

If a message is delivered, it is scored by SpamAssassin.  If the
threshold is above a certain level, it goes into a spam folder.

Otherwise, if everything goes well, it gets delivered to my inbox.

Before I set up this spam filtering, I was receiving about 500 spams
per day.  Now, I get about 30 spams per day, with one or two making it
to my inbox per week.


As another point, I can say that my University uses Postini for their
spam filtering, and I'm very happy with it.  One or two false
positives a year, and probably one or two spams that get to my inbox
per year.   I don't know what they pay for the service, but its
probably worth it.