I have had the same email address since 1997 (when microsoft stole bob.com from me thanks to network solutions...)
In the early days I of course was free with my email and used it everwhere. Fast forward to 2012, some 15 years later.
woof..the amount of spam sent to me has always just kept getting worse and worse.
On my centos 5 server I just used sendmail with spamassassin and it killed a lot. Still, 100s, sometimes more made it through. Then thunderbird would weed out more, learned as it went... Still, had an inbox with a lot of junk.
Now I have set up a centos 6 box using postfix. Today I decided to try to add smtpd restrictions. After a lot of reading and testing I 'seem' to be doing incredible. I wanted to share my current working postfix smtpd restrictions area so that others who are interested can start with it.
I just added the helo and sender restrictions and have noticed no problems yet. There were many things some sites said to add, but they killed some very legitimate mail.
So...yesterday a few hundred mails in my box as usual. Plus I set up procmail to not delete spam so I could test. That gave me hundreds more....
30 minutes since putting this up I went from 1 every few seconds to 1 in 30 minutes. And that was tagged by spamassassin as spam. 1.
Not sure if this setup is perfect, but it is working quite well. Yes, the mail takes a few seconds longer and there is probably more I could do, but this ROCKS!!!
smtpd_delay_reject = yes smtpd_helo_required = yes
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,permit
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname, reject_invalid_helo_hostname, permit
smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_non_fqdn_sender, reject_unknown_sender_domain, permit
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = reject_non_fqdn_recipient, reject_unknown_recipient_domain, permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination, reject_invalid_hostname, reject_unauth_pipelining, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org, reject_rbl_client truncate.gbudb.net, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net, sleep 1, permit
smtpd_data_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_multi_recipient_bounce, permit