Someone got ahold of my information (actually, I know who they are - t2net.net - just not how to get back at them) and now I'm getting 4 phone calls a week upwards of 20 spams a day.
I'm trying to put an end to the spam at least and the built-in stuff for Evolution isn't working as well as it should I did some Googling on procmail and fetchmail and spamassassin config files and much of this documentation is out of date for CentOS 4.1 because it uses a newer version of spamassassin. Can someone point me in the direction of some example config files that just rewrite the subject lines so I can filter them.
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Preston
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:01, Preston Crawford wrote:
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Auto forwarding of such messages is not a good idea. If there are any false positives you could end up having legit email marked as spam and sent to these third party systems. You should have some kind of confirmation before sending on such email.
Depending on the type of spam you are getting you want to make sure spamassassin bayesian filters are working. I think you need to have fed it about 200 spam messages before it kicks in. You may also get good results using some of the alternative rule sets provided by http://www.rulesemporium.com/.
If you were running your own MTA I would recommend you implement greylisting. This would eliminate >98% of spam with little or nor impact to your MTA servers resources.
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:21 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:01, Preston Crawford wrote:
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Auto forwarding of such messages is not a good idea. If there are any false positives you could end up having legit email marked as spam and sent to these third party systems. You should have some kind of confirmation before sending on such email.
That's a good point. That's just me speaking in frustration. When the spam turns to phone calls on your CELL PHONE it starts to get really maddening. It makes you want to change your phone number and your email address every 6 months. Which, if you're a software developer and a contractor (like me), isn't very practical. People have to know how to reach you.
Depending on the type of spam you are getting you want to make sure spamassassin bayesian filters are working. I think you need to have fed it about 200 spam messages before it kicks in. You may also get good results using some of the alternative rule sets provided by http://www.rulesemporium.com/.
I think they are, but maybe I'm not marking enough stuff junk in Evolution (which I assume uses spamassassin).
If you were running your own MTA I would recommend you implement greylisting. This would eliminate >98% of spam with little or nor impact to your MTA servers resources.
I'm using fetchmail + pine and then evolution. Sendmail is somewhere in there as it comes with CentOS. Not sure where to implement the greylisting, though. I'll have to look that up.
Preston
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 12:11, Preston Crawford wrote:
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:21 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:01, Preston Crawford wrote:
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Auto forwarding of such messages is not a good idea. If there are any false positives you could end up having legit email marked as spam and sent to these third party systems. You should have some kind of confirmation before sending on such email.
That's a good point. That's just me speaking in frustration. When the spam turns to phone calls on your CELL PHONE it starts to get really maddening. It makes you want to change your phone number and your email address every 6 months. Which, if you're a software developer and a contractor (like me), isn't very practical. People have to know how to reach you.
Depending on the type of spam you are getting you want to make sure spamassassin bayesian filters are working. I think you need to have fed it about 200 spam messages before it kicks in. You may also get good results using some of the alternative rule sets provided by http://www.rulesemporium.com/.
I think they are, but maybe I'm not marking enough stuff junk in Evolution (which I assume uses spamassassin).
That is my understanding as well. I have been running spamassassin as a filter in an older version of evolution for the past couple of years. The bayesian filter catches all but a handful of spam that is sent to my accounts. You will need to mark enough items as junk (about 200 I think) to get the bayesian filter to start tagging spam. The big benefit of this is that it learns what you think is spam not someone else's idea. It just takes enough samples to make it work as expected.
If you were running your own MTA I would recommend you implement greylisting. This would eliminate >98% of spam with little or nor impact to your MTA servers resources.
I'm using fetchmail + pine and then evolution. Sendmail is somewhere in there as it comes with CentOS. Not sure where to implement the greylisting, though. I'll have to look that up.
As I expected, in your setup you won't be able to setup greylisting. Your ISP would have to set it up on their MTA. Your best option is to get bayes trained and possibly add a few selected rule sets to spamassassin from the rules emporium as mentioned before.
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 16:32 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
That is my understanding as well. I have been running spamassassin as a filter in an older version of evolution for the past couple of years. The bayesian filter catches all but a handful of spam that is sent to my accounts. You will need to mark enough items as junk (about 200 I think) to get the bayesian filter to start tagging spam. The big benefit of this is that it learns what you think is spam not someone else's idea. It just takes enough samples to make it work as expected.
I'm just getting to that point now, I think. I was just trashing stuff before. Now I'm marking it. It's starting to work better. I just need to get SOMETHING working with fetchmail. Because when I'm away from home I ssh into my home box and check email with fetchmail + pine.
I'm using fetchmail + pine and then evolution. Sendmail is somewhere in there as it comes with CentOS. Not sure where to implement the greylisting, though. I'll have to look that up.
As I expected, in your setup you won't be able to setup greylisting. Your ISP would have to set it up on their MTA. Your best option is to get bayes trained and possibly add a few selected rule sets to spamassassin from the rules emporium as mentioned before.
What about putting spamassassin in between fetchmail and the delivery? I think I've done that before. I just can't remember how.
Preston
Preston Crawford wrote:
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:21 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 11:01, Preston Crawford wrote:
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Auto forwarding of such messages is not a good idea. If there are any false positives you could end up having legit email marked as spam and sent to these third party systems. You should have some kind of confirmation before sending on such email.
That's a good point. That's just me speaking in frustration. When the spam turns to phone calls on your CELL PHONE it starts to get really maddening. It makes you want to change your phone number and your email address every 6 months. Which, if you're a software developer and a contractor (like me), isn't very practical. People have to know how to reach you.
[snip]
Do you live in the U.S.A? Does the spammer live in the U.S.A? If so, then I suggest you get on the national "Do Not Call" list. If they persist in calling you, then you can get (a) money and (b) criminal charges filed against them.
Won't help with the SPAM much, but should cause the phone calls to taper off.
Mike
centos-bounces@centos.org <> scribbled on Sunday, August 28, 2005 10:02 AM:
Someone got ahold of my information (actually, I know who they are - t2net.net - just not how to get back at them) and now I'm getting 4 phone calls a week upwards of 20 spams a day.
I'm trying to put an end to the spam at least and the built-in stuff for Evolution isn't working as well as it should I did some Googling on procmail and fetchmail and spamassassin config files and much of this documentation is out of date for CentOS 4.1 because it uses a newer version of spamassassin. Can someone point me in the direction of some example config files that just rewrite the subject lines so I can filter them.
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
Preston
On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 10:01, Preston Crawford wrote:
Someone got ahold of my information (actually, I know who they are - t2net.net - just not how to get back at them) and now I'm getting 4 phone calls a week upwards of 20 spams a day.
I'm trying to put an end to the spam at least and the built-in stuff for Evolution isn't working as well as it should I did some Googling on procmail and fetchmail and spamassassin config files and much of this documentation is out of date for CentOS 4.1 because it uses a newer version of spamassassin. Can someone point me in the direction of some example config files that just rewrite the subject lines so I can filter them.
I recommend MimeDefang http://www.mimedefang.org/ as a wrapper to control all your spam and virus scans. It has built in hooks for about everything you might want and is controlled by a snippet of perl that you customize for your preferences. It uses sendmail's milter interface to run in realtime during the smtp converstation but under a different user id.
Preston Crawford wrote:
Someone got ahold of my information (actually, I know who they are - t2net.net - just not how to get back at them) and now I'm getting 4 phone calls a week upwards of 20 spams a day.
I'm trying to put an end to the spam at least and the built-in stuff for Evolution isn't working as well as it should I did some Googling on procmail and fetchmail and spamassassin config files and much of this documentation is out of date for CentOS 4.1 because it uses a newer version of spamassassin. Can someone point me in the direction of some example config files that just rewrite the subject lines so I can filter them.
An IDEAL setup would be one where spam gets auto-forwarded to the FTC's spam email address and to BlueSecurity.com. But I don't know if such a program exists for Linux.
I don't know how useful it would be in your situation, but have you tried bogofilter?
I use Thunderbird for my mail. I click "Junk" on the spam messages I receive and each messages is added to a Junk folder. Thunderbird has its own SPAM filter built in, so I have that well trained by this point.
I have procmail set up to run bogofilter on incoming messages and then check the results. If the message checks out as SPAM, it automatically gets moved to my Junk folder. Every hour I have a cron job on my IMAP server that runs bogofilter over the Junk folder to educate it as well.
Between these two apps I've cut out the sometimes 100+ SPAMs a day (it's usually only about 20, but some days are really bad).
This system occasionally catches legit mail, so I manually scan the Junk folder every day for anything out of the ordinary. I keep the almost 8000 messages that it contains in case I need to rebuild it quickly after a system crash.
Thunderbird also maintains a white list for me, further assisting in this regard. The only downfall to that is that I must put EVERYONE in my white list, including people I may only hear from once.
Hope this helps,
--Shawn
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Les Mikesell -
Mike Kercher -
Mike McCarty -
Preston Crawford -
Scot L. Harris -
Shawn M. Jones