Combating spam

telex4 · l33t Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 704 Location: Reading, UK

Hullo,

I'm getting a little fed up with spam of late. It was all hunky dory until Newsforge put my email address in my article, and in the past few months it has risen to about 10 messages a day, which isn't awful, but is irritating.

How do people combat spam? I'd love to use SpamAssassin, but I don't think you can use it unless you have access to the mail server (is that right?) I'm getting my e-mail from a POP3 server and checking in KMail (and no I don't want to use Mozilla mail 1.3)

barran · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 12:32 pm Post subject:

Well you could use fetchmail, Spamassassin, procmail I suppose?
Or fetchmail and TMDA. I do not know much about TMDA but I think you must have access to the server.

scout · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:03 pm Post subject:

I found a little perl script that is called disspam and that checks a POP3 account by downloading the headers, then looking if it is marked as spam in "black-list" sites, and deleting it from the server directly. You can configure it in less that 5 minutes, and it works quite well.
Obiviously it is not as good as other progs, but it is so simple ! It deletes 40 spam-emails a day for me

Matje · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 2:13 pm Post subject:

You should take a look at previous GWN's, there's one tips&tricks where it's described howto do spam filtering. Also, somewhere else on this forum is a great tip on setting up SpamAssassin with Evolution. I can't tell you how it works now, because I'm not @ my gentoo box.

PS: It's a bad idea to just delete spam, move it to a seperate folder where you can see if some messages you might actually want have been marked as spam. I get about one or two messages like that every few weeks. Usually it are newsletters & such, but I'm too lazy to add the addresses to my safe-filter :-)

_________________
Life is like a box of chocolates... Before you know it, it's empty...

Reformist · Guru Joined: 06 Oct 2002 Posts: 323

Here's a link to that thread, it's called

Evolution + SpamAssassin = less spam in your mailbox
_________________
-Phil Crosby

jkcunningham · Posted: Thu May 01, 2003 5:44 pm Post subject:

I've been using procmail -> fetchmail -> spamassassin (and razor) -> kmail for years. Works great.

-Jeff

moss · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 18 Location: UK

I must say that I've been very impressed with bogofilter. I used to use SpamAssassin but I found that it just took too long to process all my email when I downloaded it and I had to keep fine tuning my config to reduce the amount of false positives.