The spam filter for my violate.ca mail is great. It flags all the mail my mum sends as spam and lets through all the viagra and penis patch mail.

"There's really only one sexually related thing I'm good at: Producing incredibly volumous amounts of spooge on a regular basis." - ni

our biggest issue right now is storage.  But the owner thinks our biggest issue is spam.  More specifically, he's had a couple of emails end up in his spam folder that should not have.

Maybe five, total, but all five were like drop-dead important.

We use GFI Mail Essentials on an Exchange box.  Apparently, he'd never had a false-positive when we used spamassassin and postfix.  I know this is not true, but myopia, etc.

So the most important issue right now is: where do we find a perfect spam filter?

We're investigating a combination of a barracuda box and cloudmark.  Cloudmark makes a host-based piece, I believe.  They get good ratings for their server product...fewest false positives out there.

So, in short: maybe cloudmark.  Maybe not.  I really don't think there's a good way around it from the host side.  On the server side, I need graylisting and whitelists and absolute perfection which I hear is about as possible as me winning this lottery I haven't entered.
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"You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin

One I publicise and register for stuff with (currently ~100 spam per day) and another that I actually use and very rarely publicise. (~3 spam per day). I rarely check the spam box.

Founder member Golgafrinchan 'B' Ark

my work account gets about 5 stock market tip spams a week. I have no idea what they do to filter it, and I have NEVER given it to a website.

my yahoo mail about 3 years ago was terrible for spam, so bad that I started hosting my email myself. It's gotten much better, but I've already given up on it as a permenant address and now use it as the account to give out to the people who are probably going to sell my address.

gmail works well, but again, I've mostly not given it out to the sort of places that will sell my address. It does get a lot of spam, but the filters catch most of it.

I'd figure that the large webmails like yahoo and gmail would be the best at spam catching, because they'd see so much of it, it'd be easier to classify as spam. If the only email two addresses have ever gotten in common is spam messages, any email sent to both is also highly likely to be spam.

whitelisting is so easy to do with a phone, because anyone calling not in the phone can be unanswered, and if it's important, they'll leave a message. At that point, you can decide whether or not to whitelist the new person. But It doesn't work as well with email.

I just forward everything to my gmail account now - I gave up on sorting out spamassassin to work properly for me, and decided to let Big Goo handle it. I checked it for false positives for a little while, now I figure if it's that important, they'll phone me.

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DFJ?

you do need an address where editors can get e-mail to you, though.

Power up your flaming yo-yos already! --StackyMcRacky

Bought a domain to do all my email and websites with. Didn't realise it'd been used before. Thankfully, it was easy enough to filter Minnie's emails away as she only used the one email address, but dear god was she signed up to some shit.

we ran dspam at my former company, I went from 400 spams/24h to 1 every two days.
It's amazingly efficient.
I'm running it now on my own server, it keeps the boxes spam-free (I get maybe one every two weeks).

You have to train it for a few days before it starts working, but after that it's almost maintenance-free. It's really an amazing piece of software.

I used to check for false positives a lot when I first started using it, but never found a single one. And it only lets spam through once in a blue moon.

SpamAssassin on the server, AVG on the local system. Seems to work reasonably well. I still get 20-30 in my in-box every day, but they're usually pretty obvious.

The SpamAssassin ones are deleted directly and not even downloaded. I supposed there might be a false positive but that's just too bad.

The AVG anti-spam stuff is pretty aggressive but configurable.
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Please switch off your computer.

The only solution I have had so far is to never post your address, anywhere, ever.

With the spam coming from all sides, there's only one way to fix this and that's a complete rewrite of SMTP.

Now instead of complaining that they get mountains of spam, my users complain when they get one.

SpamAssassin to tag, bogofilter to classify. It has yes/no/maybe and so the false-positive rate is very very low, and if you already have a decent corpus of spam and ham to do the initial bogofilter training with, the accuracy gets very quick very fast. Anything suspicious generally shows up in 'maybe' to begin with. My two main email addresses have only been around for a couple years and they get a fuckton of spam, and not much legitimate mail.
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ceci n'est pas une signature
i like plaid

...but of the 100+ spams/day that i get, apple mail catches about 98% of them with only ONE false positive in the time i've used it (i'm paranoid about that shite, so i double check as the mails come in...which defeats the point of a spam filter...but i digress).

if i could trust the technology, i would just leave it be.  thunderbird used to be really good, but i'm a program whore and need to switch all the time.  though i doubt that i will move away from mail.


_{Clock is right. [nt] --vorheesleatherface}

When your address is that old, there isn't a lot you can do.

It's so widely circulated that there is almost no hope of recovering it.  If it's getting hit by Brightmail and then Gmail and then Thunderbird and it's not below 10, you have what I would consider to be an unrecoverable address.

There may be more things you could do to cut down the number of spams, but in the end it isn't worth the effort.  You really you need to shitcan the address and start over with a new mail addy.  That's my .02 Euro.

Gedvondur
"It is virtually impossible to effectively aim a jellyfish, a creature created by God almost solely for the purpose of not flying."- CRwM

I swear by my spamassassin box.

fetchmail+procmail+spamassassin+imap

It was fiddly to set up, but I haven't had to touch it in literally a couple of years.

re: no second box - any old crap pulled out of a dumpster would have enough horsepower for a mail server.

What are you, some sort of can't-use-a-keyboard Windows weenie? Why are you clicking on a spam button? "J" junks the currently highlighted message, and I've not seen Thunderbird change the selected message focus yet.

a SPAM message slips through my Gmail filter and I get a false positive once every couple of months.

Don't know what you're doing wrong. Quite manageable here.

"You can't really know something until you ruin it for everyone." -some guy who used to have an account here

and don't worry about false positives on the gmail. If they really need to get ahold of me they'll write again, or phone.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

Yahoo is my public address.  I've had the same one since 1997.  It's where I got my ID for this site and many others.  Anyway, I get a couple hundred spam a day, and Yahoo catches somewhere around 98% of  it.  What  it doesn't I mark as spam so that  they can try to update their filters off the profile.  Same goes with Gmail which is the same ID, but isn't published anywhere.

I have a domain. When I give out emails to companies, I give out "CompanyName@domain". SpamAssassin gets run at everything. I use procmail to test scripts against some files:

• Anything to a blacklisted address (companies selling to spammers) goes to /dev/null.
• Anything from a whitelisted address (friends/family/etc.) or from a whitelisted domain (bank/mortgage company/etc.) goes directly to my inbox.
• Anything to a whitelisted address (the ones I give out) goes directly to my inbox.
• Anything to an address I have not given out goes to /dev/null.
• Anything not matching above that is marked by spam assassin as spam goes to /dev/null.
• Anything left after all this goes to a special "unknown sender" folder.

The "unknown sender" folder gets 3-5 emails a week, and it is 90% spam. My inbox gets no spam at all.

The system took a bit to set up, and takes a small bit of effort to maintain, but it really does eliminate virtually all spam.

I periodically check what is going to /dev/null. It's 100% spam, and Spam Assassin misses about 30% of it.

At work I don't have as much control. Thunderbird is all I have to filter, and it is complete and utter shit. Near worthless.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

I have qpsmtpd configured with, oh, god knows. Lots of options including blacklists and whitelists and greylists and temporarily refusing the recipt of emails from people who haven't written before and realtime block lists.

I don't worry about false positives, because I bounce spam. If my filters think it's spam, the SMTP server sending it will get a refusal code. If my filters think it's spam, the person sending it is told that.

But I still get about 50 a day.

At work, I built a similar setup, but the boss panicked over one email that he didn't receive and made me turn it off. Which means I get a couple of hundred a day at work now, and my overactive D finger deletes things that look spammy to me without reading them. When the boss sends a message with subject "Fwd: RE: Urgent" clearly it's not gonna be read. That kinda thing I have to delete dozens of times a day.

Still. I'm paid while I'm deleting that spam so, like, whatever.

Pre..........
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Yes! The Conspiracy Really Exists...

I'm also considering no longer using email, or only using a whitelist and blocking everything else. I do have my own server with multiple sites running on it, but the problem is that I can't get spamassasin and the other shit working. It's just not worth it. I either need something that can be installed or to pay someone else to set it up for me. I'm tired of all the spam. I get hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day blocked, and anywhere from 20 - over 100 get past the Yahoo filter on a daily basis.
- - - - -
That's what I always say about you, boz, you have a good memory for random facts about pussy. -- joh3n

years ago. I haven't looked back since then.

_{"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him." - Thomas Szasz}

only one is usually spam, if that. That is with my outlook express. I've had this account for about 7 years now. My gmail acct doesnt get much spam either, maybe 1 a day if that. I have only had that one for a few months. I find my Yahoo and Hotmail get all the spams so i don't really use them. They are usually just deleted.

Deer hunting would be fine sport, if only the deer had guns. ~William S. Gilbert