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

Sun Aug 28 17:16:08 UTC 2005
Shawn M. Jones <smj at littleprojects.org>

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documentation is out of date for CentOS 4.1 because it uses a newer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