It's a little off topic, and not really suitable for deployment on an isp central mail server, but.. I think I've 100% solved my personal spam problem. I 0wn it, it is my b***h =) Tune out now if you don't care, read on if you want to know how. I've been using TMDA for about a year now, and I recently added Spam Assassin to that. The first piece of spam that made it through this system arrived today. Thats out of about 4000 bits of spam. The only reason that made it through was that the spammer actually replied to the confirmation email that TMDA sends back (I'll get him later). TMDA works like a treat. You have to make the decision that you're willing to inconvienience people who mail you the first time (with a confirmation process). Out of the 294 people on my whitelist I've only had two complain. And both of them thought it was a better idea after I phoned/had beer with them. I worry that some people will not respond nor complain, but a quick check of unconfirmed messages shows me that this is not the case. Even my grandmother managed to work it out. This will not be appropriate for you work email account however. Telling customers to prove who they are is never good. I also have email aliases which mypass some or all of my spam system. eg if I know someone is going to hate being annoyed then they might get blah(a)deanpemberton.com which has no checking on it. The downside to TMDA is that it tries to send a confirmation email for each suspect email that it receives. The postmaster for the box where I have this set up had a bit of a whinge that this was causing too much postmaster mail (because most of them will die because they are sent to bogus spam addresses). His solution to this was to front end the system with Spam Assassin. I was pretty dubious at first. The reason I had gone with TMDA was that I never wanted to miss a real message. I didn't think that packages like SA did a very good job. I'm happy to say that I've been proved 100% wrong. SA sits at the front and looks at the messages - if it thinks it's spam then it tags it with why and places it in my Spam folder (which I think I'd check once a day when I'm bored). I think it has tagged real mail as spam once and that was because a friend forwarded me some spam. If the message makes it through SA, and about 10% of spam does, then TMDA gets it and sends off a confirmation email if the address is not in it's whitelist. This is so effective that as I say only one piece of spam in the last 4000 has made it to my inbox. And that needed to a) not look like spam to SA, and b) have the spammer give his real address and then take the time to reply to a confirmation message from me. Quite rare eh. SA is doing such a good job that I've started to apply some statistical modeling to how it ranks my spam. It fits a weibul distribution almost perfectly and I plan to use this to tune the parameters so that I can prove that it's catching the maximum amount of spam while minimising the risk of it tagging real mail. The graphs look pretty =) So this double approach really works for me. If you want to know anything else then just mail me offline. If you want to see it in action (TMDA that is) then mail me offline =) Here are some links http://tmda.net/ http://spamassassin.org/ Later Dean On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 07:49:41AM +1300, Craig Whitmore wrote:
As the amount of spam grows as the internet grows bigger, using RBL's is growing as well (to try and stop/slow the spam).
I am wondering what RBL's other ISP's/Companies in NZ Use?
There are quite a number (of RBL's) but a few can't be used as they still have Xtra's Network in them (for "Sueing ORBS" they say), but the best I've found so far has been http://relays.osirusoft.com.
Can anyone suggest a better one/comments/pitfalls on using RBL's for slowing down spam.
Thanks Craig Whitmore Orcon Internet http://www.nzdsl.co.nz
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