[CentOS] Rejecting spam

Tue Mar 4 20:57:49 UTC 2008
Tim Alberts <talberts at msiscales.com>

Dan Carl wrote:
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org]On
>> Behalf Of Glenn
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 2:00 PM
>> To: CentOS mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Rejecting spam
>>
>>
>> At 02:35 PM 3/4/2008, you wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Sorry, not a direct CentOS question, but I know there's a lot of
>>> experienced users on this list...I'm using CentOS with sendmail and
>>> spamassassin. I've got it configured with spamass-milter and it is
>>> working correctly.  However, I was expecting to be able to reject
>>> mail that is marked as spam, not just deliver it as usual.  Anyone
>>> know if it can be done and how?  I know a milter can reject mail,
>>> because I've used milter-grelist in the past to give temporary
>>>       
>> fail messages
>>     
>
> Not really a good idea to reject all spam. Spam filtering is not that black
> and white.
> Suppose a legitmate email gets tagged as Spam.
> This does happen trust me and more than likely its a email your boss has
> been waiting for.
> You'll want a some way to retrieve it.
>   

I think it's a wonderful idea to not let spam into the server at all.  
If a legitimate sender is sending email that is inadvertently marked as 
spam, it will be returned to sender and they will be notified.  That's 
actually why I'm trying to switch to a 'don't let it in to begin with' 
policy.  Currently I use the spamassassin to mark spam and clients get 
their email and have a habit of giving the spam folder a glance over 
looking for legitimate email.  Well, that completely defeats the purpose 
of marking them spam to begin with?

I'm basing this decision on having run an email server for the last 8 
years, listening to the complaints of huge spam folders and mail being 
'lost' in the trash because it was falsely marked as spam.