Re: Dealing with Spam

From: Steve Werby <steve-lists_at_befriend.com>
Date: Tue 30 Jul 2002 13:40:41 -0500

"Mark Bodach" <mbodach_at_bluelanterntech.com> wrote:
> Sure spammers are hard to hit, but I keep false positives down pretty good
> unless people put 3 x's right beside each other which sometimes happens in
> my coding email yahoo groups. Right now I'm up to about 85 "filters"
> based on phrases and domains. I have cut my spam to about 25%, but the
> best is the repetitive stuff that one just can't escape is now getting
> nuked.
>
> Its about patience and determination, I figure I'll get my killing up to
> about 85% in about 3 more weeks... It takes about 4 weeks to get the
> variety of spam needed to filter most of the sex, prepaid, and descrambler
> messages.

Since millions of us receive the same spam and there are collaborative
efforts to develop updated filters and blacklists used to reduce spam, why
reinvent the wheel? Most of my expertise is with solutions to filter/block
spam at the ISP or server hosting email accounts, but even if you plan on
filtering in your end user mail program you can take advantage of the work
of others. For example, you can download SpamBouncer for free, unpack it
and make use of any of the filters included. It's open source software so
give it a try! Others have already received spam and contributed filters to
block it. Of course there are also resources which have compiled lists of
email addresses, domain names and IP addresses documented to have sent spam
or allowed spam to be relayed. Over the last 2+ years I've been using free
software like SpamBouncer, SpamAssassin, TMDA, ORBZ-like blacklists and
others to effectively filter 95-99% of spam before it ever gets to the end
user's mailbox. Which of the solutions I use for a given project or whether
I use multiple solutions depends on the needs and constraints of the client,
but any of them are likely to be more effective and less time-consuming to
maintain than any home-brewed filtering solution. YMMV. There's quite a
bit of overlap in the way most of these applications work so I'll just
provide the URLs of each for those of you who want to look into them.
Again, they are extremely effective, the software costs nothing and except
for TMDA which relies on a different concept than the others, they're
updated by groups of people who deal with more spam than any single person
on this list.

http://www.spambouncer.org/
http://spamassassin.org/
http://www.tmda.net/

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/






Received on Tue Jul 30 2002 - 13:40:41 CDT