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Spam is Dead

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the my-inbox-tells-a-different-tale dept.

Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.

2 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. Web 2.0 says no friggin way by tiltowait · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anyone with a comment-enabled blog knows that e-mail spam is small worry compared to comment spam, Splogs and the like. Wikis and the like are vulnerable to spambots as well.

  2. Want to stop it? by SCHecklerX · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes, this does take some work, and no it isn't for everybody. But this has totally eliminated all spam to my inbox (mostly due to greylisting, I think)

    1. Get a high speed connection
    2. Use some dyndns service, or register your domain, or get a business class line.
    3. Set up a sendmail server
    4. Use mimedefang, spamassassin, and milter-greylist
      • set up the greylist for 5 minutes or so. Spammers don't retry.
      • discard obvious stupidity in your mimedefang filter(no '.' in helo argument, trying to say they are you in the helo, helo is RFC1918, sender is on spamhaus RBL/XBL, etc)
      • set up things like receipt throttling and greet pause in sendmail

    I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.