On 2013/01/15 07:27, Ben Johnson wrote:
On 1/14/2013 7:48 PM, Noel wrote:
On 1/14/2013 2:59 PM, Ben Johnson wrote:
jdow, Noel, and John, I can't thank you enough for your very thorough
responses. Your time is valuable and I sincerely appreciate your
willingness to help.
Glad it was even marginally helpful.
Ben, do be aware that sometimes you draw the short straw and sit at the
very start of the spam distribution cycle. In those cases the BLs will
generally not have been alerted yet so they may not trigger. For those
situations the rules should be your friends. (I still use my treasured
set of SARE rules and personally hand crafted rules my partner and I
have created that fit OUR needs but may not be good general purpose
rules.)
This makes perfect sense and underscores the importance of a
finely-tuned rule-set. It's become apparent just how dynamic and capable
a monster the spam industry is. No one approach will ever be a panacea,
it seems.
The advice from your second email is well-received, too. Especially the
part about not killing anybody. ;) I do hope fighting spam becomes fun
for me, because so far, it's been an uphill battle! Hehe.
Noel, thanks for excellent responses to my questions.
It got fun enough in the old days with more spam than I'm getting now
to taunt the spammers who monitored this list. "Gee, XXXX, you only
managed a 95 on that last spam I got. Surely you can do better and
make it to 100 on small scoring rules." He did.
You actually get to the point you can recognize the style of various
spam programs and often relate them back to the spammer using spamhaus.
These days of full automation might make that harder. But, still, you
can probably start recognizing stylistic elements of the various
programs soon enough.
{^_^}
