Re: spam control
Thanks for the all the replies! I plan to use the Bogofilter to start with and see how its comparison with Gmail's performance improves with time. Thanks, Girish. On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Girish Kulkarni gir...@hri.res.in wrote: I've been managing my mail with Gmail for about three years now. The primary reason for sticking to Gmail is their spam control. I now want to try moving back to the old mail spool on my Debian box and start managing mail myself. I'm curious to know what spam control techniques people on this list currently use. How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? Thanks, Girish. -- Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://girish.50webs.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 09:35:40AM +0200, Teemu Likonen wrote: Bogofilter is only a Bayesian-like filter so user have to teach it what is spam and what is not spam (ham). You probably have an existing spam collection (your spam folder at gmail). As for ham: your other folders. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best ICQ# 16849754 || friend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
Girish Kulkarni a écrit : Hi, I've been managing my mail with Gmail for about three years now. The primary reason for sticking to Gmail is their spam control. I now want to try moving back to the old mail spool on my Debian box and start managing mail myself. I'm curious to know what spam control techniques people on this list currently use. How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? if you get mail directly (not relayed via any provider), then there are controls you can do at smtp time. for example, with postfix: reject_invalid_helo_hostname reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org These will block a lot of junk before data is even received. if you decide to use postfix, you can get help on the postfix-users list. you can get similar functionality in other MTAs. for the spam that goes through, spamassassin is effective out of the box. you can tune it for better results (use sa-update with selected channels, train Bayes, ... etc). for more infos, the spamassassin-users list is a good place to ask. pure bayesian filters like bogofilter can be very effective if you train them correctly. Depending on your mail flow, this may or may not be easy. you can get help on the bogofilter list. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 09:29:10AM +0530, Girish Kulkarni wrote: How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? At work I'm forced to use gmail. As I don't like its interface (including the strange imap semantics) I just pull everything via pop3 to my own server. At home I just use postifx/dovecot-imap. I use spamassassin as the spam filter. With most lists I filter in my fetchmailrc before calling to spamassassin, as those lists rarely have spam. Debian lists seem to have more spam than others[1] and thus I do filter them. Even with spamc (the small client that connects to a running spamassassin daemon) I can still get heavy load from several simultanious assassinations. Hence I have: # The lock file ensures that only 1 spamassassin invocation happens # at 1 time, to keep the load down. # :0fw * 256000 | /usr/bin/spamc To make it simpler to search for mistakes, I filter the worst offenders to a separate folder: :0 * ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* .spam-bad/ :0 * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes .spam-maybe/ I use the 'autolearn' feature of SA (which is enabled by default). This saves me most retraining, but I still need to correct errors. If a spam does get through I move it to the folder 'spam' . In my crontab I have a daily job that learns new spam from there. $ crontab -l # m h dom mon dow command 10 4 * * * /home/tzafrir/bin/spam_learn $ cat /home/tzafrir/bin/spam_learn #!/bin/sh DIR=$HOME/Maildir/.spam DIR_NEW=$DIR/new DIR_CUR=$DIR/cur sa-learn --spam $DIR_NEW $DIR_CUR [1] This is due to the policy of allowing anyone to post. I must say that I'm surprised at just how little spam gets through - Admins of the liszt-server are doing a great job. And I fully appreciate this policy and occasionally post to Debian lists I'm not subscribed to) -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best ICQ# 16849754 || friend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
Hi, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: You probably have an existing spam collection (your spam folder at gmail). As for ham: your other folders. Only if he let's it collect or he captures and keeps it over time. Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
Andrew McGlashan a écrit : Hi, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: You probably have an existing spam collection (your spam folder at gmail). As for ham: your other folders. Only if he let's it collect or he captures and keeps it over time. and he (or a trusted person) _verified_ it. training using unqualified mail is counter-productive. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
On Sat, 2009-02-28, 059, Girish Kulkarni wrote: How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? I pull all mail from Gmail, including spam, using IMAP and getmail4. Then I deliver it to Postfix running locally which looks at ~/.forward and sees | spamc | procmail. So spamc (spamassassin) adds spam headers and procmail (I plan to switch to maildrop eventually) does some filtering (no spam filtering there). I have left all the important spamassassin settings (like required_score) at the defaults. I am inclined to measure spam-filtering success by the number of false-positives (heh, the ultimate spam filter filters nothing...!). If I remember correctly, Gmail has had at 3-8 false positive while SpamAssassin has had 1-2 false positives. If I take out mailing list messages, it drops to 1-2 and 1 respectively. I suppose that more mail has gone through SpamAssassin now than did Gmail when I was using it instead. I do get a few false-negatives daily but not more than maybe 6; I don't remember how many with Gmail but I know I did get some. Of course it is relevent how much mail I get in a day: I am subscribed to several mailing lists with debian-user being the highest traffic. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: spam control
Hi, Girish Kulkarni wrote: I now want to try moving back to the old mail spool on my Debian box and start managing mail myself. I'm curious to know what spam control techniques people on this list currently use. How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? If you are in control of your incoming mail and can handle the cons of greylisting, then that would have to be one of the best methods to reduce bad emails. I use greylisting with spamassassin to pretty good effect. Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
On 2009-02-28 09:29 (+0530), Girish Kulkarni wrote: How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? I have never used Gmail but I've been very happy with Bogofilter. I fetch my mail with fetchmail and deliver it to mailboxes with procmail. I have a Procmail rule to do Bogofilter check. Bogofilter is only a Bayesian-like filter so user have to teach it what is spam and what is not spam (ham). At first the spam filter doesn't work at all. If you use Bogofilter I suggest configuring your mail client so that it's easy to classify messages as spam or ham, that is, to conveniently teach the filter. Gradually the filter gets better and better and is optimized for the kind of mail you receive. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: spam control
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 09:29:10 +0530, Girish Kulkarni (gir...@hri.res.in) wrote: I've been managing my mail with Gmail for about three years now. The primary reason for sticking to Gmail is their spam control. I now want to try moving back to the old mail spool on my Debian box and start managing mail myself. I'm curious to know what spam control techniques people on this list currently use. How is your experience with the spam control tools already available (SpamAssassin, SpanBouncer, Bogofilter)? Which one is the most favoured? Is Gmail indeed the best option for controlling spam? If you have control over your incoming email server then you can possibly get away without even using spamassassin. Using postgrey and postfix with postfix set to reject for things like invalid HELO, non-fqdn hostname, sender using a dynamic IP and/or in various blacklists, I manage to *reject* most unwanted stuff rather than accepting it and then, later, rejecting it with spamassassin. I like to think that rejecting it keeps me off the spammers' lists because it is seen as a delivery failure. -- Bob Cox. Stoke Gifford, near Bristol, UK. Please reply to the list only. Do NOT send copies directly to me. Debian on the NSLU2: http://bobcox.com/slug/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
