[NCLUG] Re: mmmmmmm...spam control

[Doug Holland]

Has anyone tried SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.sourceforge.net/) 
yet?  It's a spam filtering program that uses all sorts of heuristic 
rules to identify spam.  It has all sorts of tests that check for things 
like bogus headers, phrases like "penis enlargement", disclaimers 
claiming compliance with spam laws, removal instructions.  It also 
checks to see if the mail comes from blacklisted sources, and it also 
checks a database of known spam to see if a message matches.  From what 
I hear, it's very effective.

Doug

Mike Loseke wrote:

>Thus spake rosing at peakfive.com:
>
>>White lists would be bad for people running a business.  But what
>>about mailers that are "spam aware"?  Something with a white, black,
>>and gray list.  Anything from a known friend comes through.  Anything
>>from a known spammer gets tossed. Everything else goes into a neural
>>net that makes suggestions for you and learns, based on your
>>response.  So, the phrase "penis enlargement" would quickly get
>>tagged.  Oh well, but then people that try and build these things
>>(anti-spam sw) could never really talk to each other.  For example,
>>this message would get nuked. oh well, not a great loss.
>>
>
> Another tactic I've seen recently is to intentionally mis-spell some words
>in the subject in what I would assume to be an attempt to get by some of
>the filters currently in use.
>
> At one point I was running some procmail filters in an attempt to dispose
>of some spam. While it did work to some extent I didn't completely trust it
>to just delete it, so it instead dropped what was assumed to be spam into a
>spam mailbox which I would check from time to time to make sure something I
>didn't want to delete didn't get caught in there. I eventually stopped
>doing this because of the constant editing of .procmail recipes.
>