[TriLUG] Spam article on Mandrake forum... focus on Postfix and Qmail

[Benjamin Reed]

Jon Carnes [jonc at haht.com] wrote:
> There is a nice write up on nuking spam on Mandrakes forum:
> 
> http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/docs/spam.php
> 
> Isn't it amazing that there is a whole industry built on denying
> a whole separate industry...  Jon

Haha, how very true.

I've recently been working with 2 different spam tools that are
really starting to kick some ass.

First is SpamAssassin: http://spamassassin.taint.org/

They basically take a heuristics approach to spam, and it seems to
catch almost everything, so far.  It's a really slick tool, and
all you need to do is set it up in procmail (or filter directly
with a .forward if you don't do mail filtering otherwise) and it's
pretty much set.  I had to raise the threshold a little or I got
some false positives, but it's otherwise pretty spiffy.

The second is Vipul's Razor: http://razor.sourceforge.net/

It's essentially a reporting system where people submit a SHA hash
of a spam e-mail, and then you run a client as part of your filter
that checks the SHA of all incoming e-mails against this network
database of bad e-mail.  People have submitted some false positives,
but they are working on a system for "trusted committers" that will
fix letting just anyone submit a mail as spam and having it mess
things up for everyone.

Right now, I am using both for just filtering into a "spam" box
that I check occasionally, but once I'm confident in the way things
work, I'll /dev/null them (maybe based on the rating).

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger at befunk.com)
http://defiance.dyndns.org/ / http://radio.scenespot.org/
Frankenstein was the creator -- not the monster.  It's a common
misconception, held by all truly stupid people. -- Kryten