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SpamAssassin Gets a Promotion
darthcamaro writes "The folks at internetnews.com are reporting that the Spam Assassin project has been promoted to a full top level Apache Software Foundation project..the project has been in incubation for a while and it's finally made it through...the article also reveals that Apache is now using Spam Assassin themselves: 'I think spam filtering is now a critical part of the network infrastructure and Spam Assassin is a leader in the area,' said Daniel Quinlan, chairman of the Apache Spam Assassin Project Management Committee."
I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.
Procmail can do it, but please reconsider the auto-replies. What happens if I'm pissed at bob and decide to sent out 1m spams with the return address of bob@example.com? More common, what about viruses that forge headers?
I would consider auto-whitelisting instead.
Spam Assassin, while a very clever program, is as misdirected as the "Canned Spam" legislation. It has no effect on the real economics of spam: who pays for it.
Somebody is paying for the spamming, and we know exactly who it is. The URL of that organization is prominently displayed in every item of spamail. It is the advertiser.
The advertiser is right there out in the open, easy to locate. If they're not, the spam isn't doing its job, and wouldn't have been sent. And easy to locate means easy to go after, easy to sue, to fine, DoS or whatever.
Dinging the advertisers, and dinging them hard, will instantly put the spammers out of business.
Spamming can be eliminated without blocking, white lists, or anti-spoofing RFC's. Just go to where it's pointing.
To draw an [ugly, graphic] picture: a dog comes and poops on sidewalk in front of my house, and I step in it. Yelling at the dog is going to be only moderately successful, building a poop filter is difficult, messy, and leaky (as Spam Assassin demonstrates) . Following the dog's leash and fining the owner is what works.
The owner doesn't bring the dog back since s/he doesn't want to pay another fine.
No owner, no dog, no spam.
Get the owner.
Kill the spam.
spam is really not a concern anymore. You mean except for bandwidth I assume.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Challenge/Response is fundamentally broken. For more information, take a look at some discussions on the topic from debian-user: here's one. There's a few google-harvested discussions on the topic too.