Anti spam solutions

[Wil McGilvery]

I have tried Spam Assassin and other filters, but have given up trying to keep up with the spammers.

I now use a program called messagewall. (http://messagewall.org) It is a qmail server built to be an email gateway.

(I was looking to set up something similar, but since they had already done it for me, why bother?) 

It uses a number of checks to checks to determine spam, but it does not filter by keywords.

It uses reverse DNS, DNSRBL's, message headers, and attachment filtering. You can decide how strict you want the system to be and the user forum is pretty good.

Since I implemented this gateway our spam has been reduced almost 90%. I don't receive any attachments that are executable in the Windoze world so I have been spared the agony of receiving all those nasty attachments.

However; if I could have my way I would implement an opt-in email system similar to TMDA. I personally don't have an issue with registering with an email system to send email. I do that already with user lists. Other users in our company are not so sure. Of course if everyone used that kind of system, Spammers would probably find a way around it as well.

Hmmm....

Regards,

Wil McGilvery
Manager
Lynch Digital Media Inc

         

416-744-7949
416-716-3964 (cell)
1-866-314-4678
416-744-0406  FAX
www.LynchDigital.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Fraser Campbell [mailto:fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 12:34 AM
To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
Subject: [TLUG]: Anti spam solutions

Hi,

I had nothing much to say or ask when I started writing this email but now 
that I've thought about it ... do any of you have any experience with 
commercial anti-spam solutions?

Of particular interest to me are Roaring Penguin's CanIt and 
Sophos/ActiveState's PureMessage?  To a lesser extent I am interested in 
commercial RBLs such as MAPS and their effectiveness versus the free RBLs (I 
use sbl.spamhaus.org, bl.spamcop.net and relays.ordb.org).

*Any* other commercial or non-commercial solutions that you find effective I'd 
like to hear about.

I ask about commercial solutions because they usually come with management 
interfaces that I do not have the time to write currently. AFAIK, pure open 
source tools like spamassassin do not have anything other than text config 
files and command line invocations.  Clients mostly seem to prefer GUIs.  I 
would love to hear about mangement interfaces for the open source tools that 
I might have missed.


-- Original rant on W32/Gibe-F preserved below for my amusement --

When this beloved virus first came out I had the pleasure of being one of the 
early recipients, to the tune of 200 copies per day.

I took Henry Spencer's suggestion of blocking all email greater than 140000 
bytes and that was 100% effective, today my mother was trying to email me a 
few pictures and it was over that size, off came the block, back came the 
viruses.

I use bogofilter to filter out my spam and it is happily detecting these 
viruses and putting them in my spam folder, along with the hundreds of 
idiotic messages stating that I have sent a virus and regular spam.  However 
at an average of 145K each that about 900MB of this virus per month that I 
will be receiving, I don't believe that I should be the one paying for that 
bandwidth.

I know that I can solve this problem by putting the size limitation back into 
postfix but there is legitimate email that approaches that size without 
having large executable attachments (check our the barfs on a freeswan list).  

Do we just have to get used to the idea of trashing 10 emails for every 
legitimate one (as is often the case with snail mail)?  What will happen as 
more computer illiterates come online with their incompetent operating 
systems?  Perhaps the solution is to make everyone go back to communicating 
at 9,600bps?

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                             Debian GNU/Linux

--
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--
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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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