[Ukfreebsd] mail

[RW]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:42:32 -0600 (CST)
Jeff LaCoursiere <jeff at jeff.net> wrote:

> 
> Not neccessarily a FreeBSD question specifically, although I *am*
> running my mail (pine) on FreeBSD...
> 
> I have finally had it with the ridiculous amount of SPAM I manage to
> mis-process every day.  Something like 800/day come in and about half
> get caught by my provider's filter, then another 25% get caught by
> spamassasin.  Don't really know how many real messages get caught in
> those two nets, but if you have to weed through 600 messages per day
> looking for false positives, it kind of defeats the purpose.

spamassasin should be able to do better than that. If you don't
want to tune it yourself, you might want to look for a better
email service provider that can do it for you.

> I am ready now to go to a whitelist based system, where only senders
> in my whitelist are allowed through to my inbox.  I am wondering if
> anyone knows of some unix based filters of this type. 

You might consider doing your white-listing in spamassassin and setting
the spam threshold really low - maybe even below zero. The advantage
of this is that the Bayesian filter will (if properly trained) give
almost all of your legitimate mail a substantial negative score even
when not whitelisted. 

There are some whitelisting tips on the spamassasin wiki:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ManualWhitelist

>  Preferably
> also with a blacklist and the ability to respond automatically to
> unseen addresses requesting a reply to get whitelisted (assuming
> spammers will never reply).
> 

But since most spam uses forged addresses you will effectivley be
joe-jobbing hundreds of people a day.