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What E-Mail Validation Tools Do You Use?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the return-to-sender dept.

morcego asks: "As we are all too much aware, spam is an increasing problem. Each of us has our own set of tools and methods to try and reduce the amount of spam we receive, each with different pros and cons. Also, on a more broad front, we have options like SPF (+ SRS), Microsoft's own Caller-ID, and Yahoo's DomainKeys that we can use. These days, it is incredibly easy to implement any (or all of these), using publicly available frameworks and libraries (libspf2, and milter, to name a few). I have been using SPF for quite some time now with some measurable results, although nothing earth shattering. Which of these are you using, if any? Why, or why not? Do you think any of them really contribute anything to fight spam?"

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. I use GMail :) by brunes69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After trying to tune SpamAssassin to work well for months, and being unimpressed by the hit/miss rate, I tok to forwarding all of my incoming email to GMail. I then forward all my email from GMail that is not spam back to my other account :0

    I find this way I get 99.95% accuracy - things that GMail misses as spam, my local SpamAssassin catches. As a side bonus I have GMail's awesome interface to read my mail when on the road (much better than the Squirrel Mail I was using, and still better than RoundCube).

    This brings up another point - I don't know why Google doesn't add IMAP connectivity to GMail, soyou could use it's interface to read email from other hosts. I don't see why their ad technology would not work with this scheme.

  2. Greylisting and SBL+XBL by whitmer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While not necessary e-mail validation tools, greylisting and SBL+XBL blocking lists by Spamhaus have eradicated nearly all spam I used to get through all of the other filters.

    Greylisting alone helped to lower e-mail traffic drastically and blocking lists take care of known spamming hosts. I'd recommend using both to anyone running a e-mail server.

  3. spf,CallerID,DKIM validates sender only not Spam ! by johnjones · · Score: 2, Interesting

    all that SPF CallerID and DKIM does is validate the sender !

    this cuts out about 70% of (stupid) spammers
    you also need to blacklist people who send you spam (and you can be confident that you get them because of the above technologies)
    if you Ever want to send lots of mail to hotmail users you need to have callerID setup yahoo and gmail both trust you more if you have domainKeys
    so things are moving on and there is no reasson why people should not have at least one of SPF CallerID or DKIM setup on their domain !

    you will note that people here also use filtering but the question is does the filtering feedback to the blacklists ?

    regards

    John Jones

    p.s. I work in the mail vendor world...