[CentOS] spam control

Wed Oct 25 15:39:33 UTC 2006
Alex Palenschat <alex at nssmgmt.com>

> After that point, it starts to get ugly. We currently manage 
> to have 96% efficiency (false positives around 0.001%), and 
> thats a daily battle. Spam traps and new rules almost every 
> day (5 days a week, at least).
> 
> For those interested, these are the RBLs I use:
>          sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
>          relays.ordb.org
>          dnsbl.njabl.org
> 
> Dropped spamcop some months ago.
> 
> []s
> 
> - -- 
> Rodrigo Barbosa

One other thing that it may be good to point out is the course that the
postfix group seems to be taking which is sanity checking incoming email
before the DATA state. This is well worth checking out and I would guess
that any well-maintained MTA would support this type of thing. So your
rbl checks/helo checks/hostname and mx checks happen before the mail is
received. This greatly reduces the amount of processing time on the MTA
and allows it to handle far more mail in these spam-predominant times.
You don't want to block most of your spam with a perl script IMHO.
On our MTA, between the aforementioned and greylisting we block enough
spam for it to be manageable on the back end with very, very few
false-positives and close to zero maintenance. I'm sure that if we
wanted to block more we could spend a lot more time setting up
traps/writing SpamAssassin rules etc. But we're quite happy with this
setup.

FYI, rbls we use are:
relays.ordb.org
list.dsbl.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org <-- best one
dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net

the last being the only one I've seen any false positives on and only 2
since we set it up. YMMV.

alex