YES!!! Spam practically down to nothing...

[Vin DSL]

I finally came up with a good system to get rid of spam. First of all, I use Spamnet, which is peer-to-peer anti-spam software. That catches a lot of spam, and it's free. This is the URL:

http://www.cloudmark.com/

Secondly, I use Spamassassin. This works good too, but I still have to clear the spam out manually. It's a pain and I'm always worried I'll miss a legitimate eMail.

I was sitting here tonight, clearing out the spam, and I thought, "Duh! Why don't you make a rule, since Spamassassin puts a URL in every spam?" Problem solved! Spams in the Inbox have dropped to practically '0.'

[Vin DSL]

hrmm...

[Vin DSL]

Guess you cannot post pics now, eh?

[Vin DSL]

Oops! It seems that they are charging for Spamnet now, but I'm still getting the service for free. Oh, well, it's one of those nights. I'm going to bed and pulling the covers over my head...

[Raven]

Or you could just be smart about where your email gets let loose.

[Vin DSL]

Huh?

[G.Bloke]

Originally posted by Raven
Or you could just be smart about where your email gets let loose.

Yes, you could also remove your postal address from your correspondance and buisness directories, does wonder to cut down on junk mail. Although coincidently around the same time your might loose touch with all your new customers. friends and loved ones.

[Connie]

Vin Dsl

I don't understand exactly what you did. I have not activated
Spam assassin on our site because of a lot of problems I have seen
in the forms about Spam assassin. I can't have a customers e-mail
bounced because Spam assassin marks it as Spam. We don't get a lot
of Spam addressed to the web site since I changed our e-mail address
to a coded address that Spam bots can't read. We do get some but I
think that is from the days that I did not use a coded address.

However, I have a personal account that gets 30 to 40 Spam
e-mails a day. That may not be a lot for some, but it is more than
I want to deal with. I have a program that will bounce them, but most
Spamers don't check for bounced e-mail to see if they are mailing to
a legitimate address. At least that's my experience.

Any way. If you have additional words of wisdom on this subject I would
be glad to hear (read) them.

[jason]

Connie,

SpamAssassin doesn't delete mail, at least in its default configuration it doesn't. It just marks the mail it thinks is spam so that you can easily recognize it. If you want you can set your mail program to delete any mail SpamAssassin has marked as spam, but you must physically make that happen yourself. What I prefer to do when I use spam filtering like that is to store those messages that the system thinks are spam in a separate folder. That way I don't have to look at them if I don't want to, but they are still there for me to double check before they're deleted--so I can see if something legit was thought to be spam before I delete everything.

--Jason

[Ron]

SpamAssassin scores each email, and gives it a corresponding "spam level", and places that "spam level" in the email message's header.

A message must reach a score of "5.00" before SpamAssassin modifies the message so that it's easy to segregate.

However, real honest to goodness spam often reaches level much, much higher than 5.00, I've seen a few as high as 21!

If you setup rules to actually delete any spam messages that have a spamassassin level of, say, 10.00 in the headers, you will cut down on the number of messages you have to manually wade through to make a "human" decision on the spamness of the message, while dramatically lowering the possibility of a real message being incorrectly deleted.

I've never seen a real email reach the level of 7, for example.

Good luck and have fun!

BTW, unless your program actually "bounces" the email at the server level, before it's accepted by the mail server, bouncing the email may actually encourage more spam...

[DIS]

Two words Mail Washer http://www.mailwasher.net/

[Vin DSL]

This 'new' system is working great!!! I've been busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger the last few days. I just got done working 23 hours straight --- 3 back-to-back shifts. I haven't checked my mail in 2 days. Normally I would have 400-500 spams sitting there. In fact, I had 1 eMail from JagPC tech support and 9 spams that somehow got through --- a total of 10 eMails sitting in my inbox. This is absolutely amazing to me...

[JPC-Greg]

You can setup rules with procmail and either store email to check through them oir just bounce the potential spams.

[G.Bloke]

To quote from a Procmail FAQ:

Q: I want to use Procmail for spam filtering. A: Good luck. Have fun. Have you considered the following? It's really kind of late to stop the spam when it's already on your mail server. Better solutions would involve your mail administrator and IP-level blocks against spam sites (RBL et al.) as well as probably additional server-level filtering. Don't reinvent the wheel. There are good recipe packages out there which you cannot duplicate without serious effort. And it'd be a waste of time anyway. You'll find links to many Procmail spam filtering packages on the links page. Procmail is excellent for fine-tuning and for sorting already identified spam to a separate folder (some sites will just tag suspect messages, but still let them through) but on today's Internet, proper antispam measures belong in the mail server layer (if not in the political layer).

I've already stated in the latest thread we had on this subject that I'd like to see RBL support on the servers, even if its a per customer option. i.e. Like Spam Assassin. Again at risk of repeating myself Spam Assassin is hit and miss and when it fails as it has done numerous times it causes exim to bounce all incoming mail. The advantage RBL has over spam assassin and others is that it uses lists of *known* spam and open relays. It doesn't use fallable rule sets and it doesn't rely on the user to sort the mail.

[Connie]

Thank to all but especially Jason and Ron, for their detailed
explanations about how SpamAssassin is supposed to work,
and how it could potentially work if a person had the
knowledge and skill to configure it. That kind of technical
skill is and probably always will be beyond me.

Greg mentioned using ProcMail. Don't have a clue as to what
that is.

It looks like SpamAssassin works similar to MailWasher. However
MailWasher not only marks known and suspected Spam, I can
designate any e-mail as Spam or friend by the click of a mouse.

I can also bounce e-mail as if it were at the server level.

What I was hoping from VinDls original post was a way to
automatically delete known Spam without having to do manually
delete it. I suspect if I got as many per day that he indicted
receiving daily in his last post, I might be willing to put in the
time to learn more of the technical side of all this.

I can live with 30 to 40 per day since 99.9% of those go to
one account, and MailWasher marks most of those so I don't have
to actually look at them. I can also delete all the junk, and then
open my e-mail client to download the e-mail I want to.

As always I find the information in the forms interesting, and
many people who are willing to share their knowledge and
expertise to help.

Hope you all have a Great Memorial Day Weekend.