Spam frustration

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:28:48AM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
> I normally *detest* when people respond saying I don't know about your 
> setup, but my setup X works great!
> 
> So please feel free to tell me to bugger off. :)
> 
> That said, I've gone through a couple mail systems in my time, and the 
> spam component was getting just terrible. I mean, ready to abandon 
> entire domains. Spamassasin, Amavis etc just didn't work for me. Then I 
> started with postgrey, and oh wow... virtually no spam at all.
> 
> Postgrey requires postfix, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't an 
> equivalent for other MTAs. All it does is, when it sees a new address, 
> it sends back a temporary failure message to the sending MTA telling it 
> to try again in five minutes. Given that the vast majority of spammers 
> ignore all returned messages, the spam never gets sent again. Meanwhile, 
> real MTAs happily acknowledge the error, wait and send the message again 
> successfully.

I believe postgrey is what is used on the incoming mail server where I
get most of my email, and certainly when they installed it there was a
huge drop in spam, so much so that instead of bogofilter finding 200 to
300 a day, it now sees 5 to 10 per day.  It does mean the first time you
receive mail from somewhere, there might be a slight delay before you
get the first message, but after that things work perfectly normal.  It
really does work.  I just haven't ever set it up myself.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists