[CentOS] Trying to control the torrent of spam...

[Preston Crawford]

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