On 2/3/03 2:31 PM, "Dennis Burnham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip] > I must say, this system has reduced my incoming spam down to about a dozen > new ones a day. With persistence, I might be able to tighten it up even > further. But I wonder if anyone else has a better modus-operandi. Wow... that's an amazing amount of work, but it looks like you're on the right track. Fortunately for us though, some have already done this work and have created some nice tools to do this work for us. My partners and I were in a similar situation about 10 months ago, so we set out to find and implement what we thought would be an acceptable solution. Not wanting to rely on the built-in junk filters and the amount of time between upgrades on mail client software, we knew we needed to take a more pro-active approach and do this filtering at the mail server. We also happen to control our own mail server which made this easy for us to do (and will for you (Dennis) as well). Our servers are running Linux/sendmail, but I know the solutions we've implemented will work with other mail servers too. The first thing we did was to install SpamAssassin <http://www.spamassassin.org/>. I'll leave it to you all to check out the site and read up on what SpamAssassin does and how it does it. There are RPM's that can be found for Red Hat Linux which made it easy for us. We installed this and then enabled it on our accounts which requires a simple modification of the .procmailrc file in your home directory on the server. There are many options as far as how it will tag and handle spam messages for you. My choice was to have it set the messages aside on the mail server for me to peruse later at my leisure. Once a week or so I can login on the server and open the mailbox using pine or some other server based mail client and see if there are any false positives (or just messages I'd like to see) which I can then save into my inbox so that Entourage will download it. >From April 1 of last year when I enabled SpamAssassin on my account, through today, it has flagged 9056 messages as spam and set them aside saving me from having to download over 68MB of spam email. (This does not include what I'm sure would be MANY images linked to in the HTML emails.) Of that bunch, I've had maybe 10-20 false positives (20/9056 = 0.0022%) which I think is amazing enough in itself. Now multiply this out to the other users on my mailserver and we're talking serious savings. Anything it catches that you don't want it to flag in the future you can add to a 'whitelist' file on the server. However, we decided this wasn't enough. We didn't even want these messages to be accepted by our server (saving bandwidth). So the second step we took was to have sendmail check several real-time black lists (RBL's). I know there are many pros and cons in regards to black lists (and probably a lot of people who would like to chew me out for doing it), but we thought we would just try it out and see how it went. This has had an amazing effect on the amount of spam seen by our mail server. Prior to implementing this change I used to see probably 50+ messages a day added to my personal spam mailbox on the server. After implementing it... I maybe see 5-10 added per day. Good enough for me (and my customers). I say it's a Good Thing� As far as how to configure sendmail on how to do this, I can't find the page I originally used as a source, but this looks similar and probably has some other helpful info on it: <http://www.jimi.dk/freebsd/SpamAssasin.php> Beyond this, I have a simple Rule defined in Entourage that basically says: if (any criteria are met): any recipient contains <emailaddress1> any recipient contains <emailaddress2> .... then: do not notify move message to "PossibleSpam" folder So... the only downside to the above is that any messages I am BCC'd on end up in the "PossibleSpam" box, but big deal... those usually aren't time critical messages and I can get 'em later. What I *can* say is that I see maybe 1 spam a month that actually makes it all the way to my Inbox. I'll suffer the 2 seconds I lose a month to delete that one.... :-) Hope this info is helpful.... -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
