Ted Wiggins writes:
> So you recv and send all of your mail through this gateway?
Yes. That lets me do limited filtering on the outbound mail (as a precaution
if some virus gets installed inside our network -- it's never caught
anything useful, but it is another layer of protection), as well as all of
the filtering of the inbound mail. The original reason for doing that was to
avoid a broken outbound proxy server (it was putting bad "HELO" messages
out, which caused Hotmail to block our mail, among others), but it also let
me fix the various delivery problems of IMS (in particular, the stuck
message causing blocking problem).
> Does Trashfinder Pro still exist? I am still using an old
> version of it on my last IMS mail server, but it has not been
> updated in years. Nice tool for the elimination of garbage.
It still exists in the sense that I shared almost all of the filtering code
(and used the TF Manager GUI) for the Gateway version. But I haven't
compiled or tested a version in quite a while. I've been mainly making only
the changes that I need since there haven't been any paying customers for TF
Pro. And honestly, I realized that I'd reached the point of diminishing
returns with TF Pro. It (and the Gateway version) block about 95-97% of the
incoming mail (and another 2-3% is "ham", the real mail). So only about 1%
(or less) of the mail is actually quarantined and has to processed manually.
(That was about 1500 messages last month, or about 50 per day). Doing that
processing takes 10-15 minutes a day. Since it is unlikely that I could ever
get the number to zero, the time saved by better filtering would be pretty
small, but the filters that I would like to have would be a lot of work to
implement. So it isn't worth it.
The most recent version of TF Pro was 1.04b (December 2007). That included
the second-level filter that optionally looks in linked websites. I'm still
not sure how good of an idea that is; I did get rid of a lot of hidden spam
(especially the infamous "Canadian Pharmacy", which is neither of course)
but the checking also sometimes subscribes/unsubscribes one from various
lists (if the links don't require confirmation clicks). I wonder if I get
more spam from doing that.
Since then, I've mainly tweaked things that seemed to be allowing spam
through unexpectedly, no significant changes other than a retry capability
that rarely does anything significant (it blocked additional 16 messages
last month). Probably not enough to make another version unless someone has
a specific problem that would be fixed by the changes. Contact me privately
if that describes you.
Randy.
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