A Billion Spam Emails

Windsun

This is not directly solar related, but because the spam affects anyone that ever had an email address, posting this info from Project Honey Pot. Just for info, we use that site as one of our sources to block IP addresses, which is why some countries, such as China and Vietnam, are totally blocked from here.

Of particular note:

.. To give you a sense, we've seen the word "******" spelled at least 956 different ways in order to try and trick spam filters...

(The *** are our own built in filters for this board, see the link for full info)

vcallaway

Re: A Billion Spam Emails

Spam is something I have a long history with. I have an email address that I've used for almost 20 years.

Ironically the first spam filter I ever put in place was to block mariacantwell@realnetworks.com. She is now my Senator. Still don't want to get email from her

I hosted my own email for years. My server would get hammered from all over the world from people trying to send spam. I used real time blacklists, ip blocking, spamassasin etc... I finally farmed out my mail handling to a third party filter service. Just the attempts were causing me problems.

Life was simpler when we used uucp.

dwh

Re: A Billion Spam Emails

Well, for anyone that runs their own email server, I use and LOVE this little bad boy here:

http://assp.sourceforge.net/

It's basically a collection of PERL scripts and a couple of cron jobs. Easy to setup, it has a training mode and it really does a most excellent job of dropping spam using Bayesian analysis. Lots of good, well thought out features - and it's simple.

In particular, I like it because it proxies by listening on port 25 and making its go/no-go decision *while* the message is being handed off to the SMTPD. This way, if it decides to drop the message, the message never ends up on the receiving server at all (no space used, no processing done other than blowing off the partially received message). And, when it drops the incoming connection, it does it with an error message that ends up in the sender's mailbox (in case the blocking is in error).


EDIT: And yes, it works on Windows boxen as well once you install PERL.

dwh

Re: A Billion Spam Emails

vcallaway wrote: »

Life was simpler when we used uucp.

FidoNet!

(extra junk for the char min w0385hwfnow8c43n)

Shadowcatcher

Re: A Billion Spam Emails

I have two web sites dedicated to transgender issues and one is now over twelve years old. I finally resorted to using recaptua for email contact, it cut my spam rate from over 500 a day to only a few that make it to the second spam filter.