State of the art spam control?

[Fraser Campbell]

Hi,

For the past few years I have been using TMDA and I have been very happy 
with it (perhaps 20 pieces of non-mailing-list spam in that time).  I 
have had no complaints from people emailing me just the odd person who 
was not in my whitelist being confused by my verification message.

Still I'm not extremely happy about how TMDA works.   I don't like the 
fact that contributes additional junk mail to all the garbage that is 
floating around out there.  I also don't like that I know I'm missing 
out on some automated mails (newsletters let's say) since most automated 
systems will not respond to verification mails and I don't always know 
where they will come from in order to whitelist them.

Last night (23:30) I finally disabled TMDA, by 06:30 I already had 54 
pieces of spam.

I rather like the idea of an anti-spam solution that rejects mail during 
SMTP transaction.  I'm not happy with the idea of any system that 
directs mail to /dev/null or even a folder that I will never read ... if 
I am not going to read it I'd like that to be explicit by issuing an 
SMTP reject, that way any unfortunate sender who gets blocked will know. 
I'm open to differing opinions on this though ...

I haven't really looked at any spam solutions since I implemented TMDA 
so I'm hoping you can all share opinions on how to beat spam (a bit of a 
vi vs. emacs type question I suppose).

I use postfix and have already formed a strong preference in the postfix 
vs. sendmail war ;-)

Thanks,
Fraser

P.S. I mostly read mail with thunderbird so for now I am going to try 
out it's built in junk filter.
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