Posts Tagged “Email”
It has been a long time since I used and configured Sendmail, and I don’t miss it one bit now that Postfix is on the scene, but the amount of spam I receive does bother me. My Junk folder had reached 160MB, mostly due to some idiots sending huge spam attachments, but also because spam [...]
Where is the evil in top posting when replying to a message on a mailing list? It’s something I’ve never understood, even after reading the many “why top posting is evil” posts and FAQs around the interweb. Inspired by yet another email complaining about a top post to the GIMP mailing list I briefly searched [...]
Greylisting is an anti-spam and virus measure you can use on your mail servers. When a remote server connects for the first time it’s automatically disconnected and can’t connect for a set time limit (default is 5 minutes). If it’s a real mail server it should keep trying to deliver the mail but viruses and [...]
Every Monday morning it’s the same. There’s a pile of spam and it numbers in the hundreds of emails. Thankfully almost all of it was caught by SpamAssassin. So, for those of you interested: Regular email: 1.3MB Spam email: 4.2MB Total spam: 507 emails. Spam that auto-trained: 400. Spam to my inbox: 3 Gives one [...]
Since upgrading to Spamassassin 2.60 yesterday I’ve noticed a (small) increase in false positives. There were only 4 out of 132 spams caught overnight, but almost all were from dsl or dynamic IP addresses. The default score for this test is 2.5, but if you add the following to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf you can change the score: [...]
Just noticed the Spam Assassin auto learn rules. Look up perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf and search for auto_learn, auto_learn_threshold_nonspam, auto_learn_threshold_spam. I’ve changed the auto_spam threshold down, as 15 is probably a bit high considering the small number of false positives I usually get.
Version 2.55 of SA is out. The release notes are a bit terse, but the notes for 2.54 indicate this is a release worth installing. It adjusts some spam rules spammers were using to get past SA! spammers have been targeting our nice rules to get themselves negative overall scores, so those rules are now [...]
Yet another release of SpamAssassin is out. Spam is definetly getting harder to track. I got one this afternoon that simply asked me to click on a url. How can you defend against that? Maybe the tmda folks have a point..
Note to self, install this at work on Monday: SpamAssassin 2.51 (via Dangerous Meta) Over the last few days a lot more spam has got through to my inbox, and it seems to be after I installed version 2.50 of SA. This could be because I was still training the Bayesian filters. I also blacklisted [...]
The latest release of SpamAssassin has support for Bayesian analysis. You have to train it and it gets better. The only problem is SpamAssassin uses a command line app, sa-learn, to learn about your mail. Who’ll volunteer to create a web-based form to copy and paste spam/legitimate mail to train it? Adding an “upload file” [...]
