On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 8:49 PM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@alice.it wrote:
David Beveridge wrote:
I'm happy to leave the definition of spam to spamassassin, and leave Mr Bayes to do my thinking for me.
And therein lies the problem.
Unfortunately spamassassin is not really the best way to stop spam. You need more.
Speak for yourself.
I do
Spamassasin does a pretty good job for me.
Postfix is incredibly configurable and where it's warranted, many filters can be brought to bear. If you don't need them good for you.
Spamassassin should just be a tool in the toolkit not the entire
solution.
It is CPU and bandwidth intensive.
I get about 300 emails a day on my small system, of which about 150 are spam, as defined by SA. I don't think this is likely to burn out my (ancient) CPU.
Precisely why it is difficult to come up with a one-size fits all solution.
A large proportion of spam can and should be rejected, before the body of the email is received.
I'm sure if and when such a system becomes available RedHat and CentOS will implement it, and I shall take advanage of their expertise.
such systems are available. eg policyd-weight As mentioned earlier on this thread.
I assume you are speaking of a system with hundreds or thousands of users. (Do such systems still exist? I thought they had died out.) I have 4 users. Our needs are very different.
Yes, my server handles email for hundreds of uses, and you're right about that, is was thousands. google uses postfix too and I'm sure they're in the millions of users.
Incidentally, I get email from sources who filter out spam, eg my college, and they don't seem to do a much better job than SA. I'm still invited to marry beautiful ladies from Russia.
Why would your college sysadmin be an expert at spam prevention?