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Spam Software Apache

SpamAssassin Gets a Promotion 168

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."
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SpamAssassin Gets a Promotion

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  • I didn't see that one coming. I have been using SA for about three years, I think... well, since whenever I heard about it anyway :)
  • Bout Time! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Irie Brother ( 64777 ) * <(slashdot) (at) (iriebrotha.org)> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:07AM (#9535402) Homepage
    A well configured installation of SA got me employee of the month way back when. Sadly, UCE/UBE is/has ruined the Internet. Finally.
    • Re:Bout Time! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jest3r ( 458429 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:50AM (#9535516)
      Today spam assassin filtered (flagged) 19,246 incoming emails out of 20,145 total on my mail server. Absolutely no false positives since I installed it a year ago .. and only a few false negatives. I silently drop anything with a score over 13 ... my cstomers are happy .. my qmail remote queue has been happy .. spam assassin is a quality app .. spam is really not a concern anymore.

      • Re:Bout Time! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mazem ( 789015 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:21AM (#9535725)
        Absolutely no false positives since I installed it a year ago ..
        ... that you know of.
      • Re:Bout Time! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jacer ( 574383 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:24AM (#9535736) Homepage
        spam is really not a concern anymore. You mean except for bandwidth I assume.
      • Re:Bout Time! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tzanger ( 1575 )

        I do the exact same thing, but with a score of 12. Anything that trips the filter as spam gets dumped into a spam folder off the main maildir and they can use IMAP or check with webmail to see what spam they have. A cron script erases anything in the spam folder older than 2 weeks. Oh yeah, and individual users can alter their own white/blacklists and scores since I pull the username and match the scores in a postgres database. Combined with clamd and qmail-scanner, it's heaven. :-)

        As for the incoming

      • Re:Bout Time! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by paperguy ( 713455 ) *
        That's a 95.5% spam rate. What are your users doing to generate so much spam?
      • Re:Bout Time! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday June 28, 2004 @08:45AM (#9550230) Homepage Journal
        I "augmented" SpamAssassin with an extremely tight Postfix ruleset. A remote server has to jump through these hoops before SA ever gets a crack at it:

        1. HELO Filtering

        1. Reject any connection that doesn't start with HELO or EHLO.
        2. Allow any host on my LAN to continue on to step 2.
        3. Reject any host not on my LAN that sends a hostname or IP of a machine on my LAN.
        4. Reject non-FQDN hostnames (ala "mailserver").
        5. Reject invalid hostnames (ala "432$@@112").
        6. Let everyone who makes it this far continue on to step 2.

        2. Sender Filtering

        1. Allow authenticated senders to continue on to step 3.
        2. Allow hosts on my LAN to continue on to step 3.
        3. Reject non-FQDN sender domains ("foo@bar").
        4. Reject unknown sender domain ("foo@imaginarydomain.com") - after all, if I can resolve their domain, then I couldn't reply to them anyway, right?
        5. Let everyone who makes it this far continue on to step 3.

        3. Recipient Filtering

        1. Reject non-FQDN recipient domains (they'd bounce anyway).
        2. Reject unknown recipient domains (same as above).
        3. Allow authenticated users to send their mail and stop processing.
        4. Allow hosts on my LAN to send their mail and stop processing.
        5. Reject mail from anyone else that isn't to one of my domains, or one I'm an MX for.
        6. Use SPF to reject spoofed email.
        7. Use the relays.ordb.org, list.dsbl.org, and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org DNS blackhole lists.
        8. Greylist all email not coming in from or going out to peer MXes.
        9. Pass everything else to step 4.

        4. Content Filtering and Delivery

        1. Use ClamAV to reject viruses. This takes a big load off SpamAssassin.
        2. Use SpamAssassin to tag messages.
        3. Use Cyrus's Sieve to reject high-probability spam, put medium-probability messages into a "review" folder, and filter everything else into the appropriate folders.

        I reject over 95% of all incoming mail before it ever gets to SpamAssassin. This means that SA's success rate isn't as good as on other systems (since I weed out all of the obvious spam), but my mailbox is happy and shiny.

        SpamAssassin is a brilliant last line of defense, but I wouldn't advise just dumping your raw incoming stream into it. Much of the useful information about a message isn't available to spamd (such as your list of local domain names, relay domains, etc.) and you should consider using a set of cheaper filters to flush out the blatant chaff.

  • erm (Score:4, Informative)

    by bruns ( 75399 ) <[moc.tibm2] [ta] [snurb]> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:08AM (#9535403) Homepage
    Perhaps Slashdot editors might want to take an extra 20 seconds to check the spelling of the URLs they put in their stories.

    spamassassin.org, not spamassasin.org
  • Great News! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:09AM (#9535406)
    This is great news! I have been running SpamAssassin on my box for quite a while, just to filter my own mail. I recently installed it on my mother's Windows 98 box to filter her mail when she checks it with Outlook Express, and she hasn't complained about Spam since. With a bit of tweaking, its been catching 95% with no false positives. Hopefully the SpamAssassin project will keep on getting better :)
    • Re:Great News! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NigritudeUltramarine ( 778354 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:59AM (#9535803)
      A success rate of 95% really sucks when (like me) you get just over 2,500 spams a day. That'd still mean around 125 spams a day would be getting through. (I've had the same email address since the early 1990's, back when there was no reason to keep your email address "secret.")

      Personally I do use SpamAssassin, but as an intermediate step.

      First step: Check a whitelist of known senders. Deliver if the sender is on the list, AND the message originated from an IP subnet that I allow for them personally.

      Second step: Scan with SpamAssassin. If the score is really high (above 20) throw it the hell out.

      Third step: If the score is less than 20, and the person wasn't whitelisted, run the message through TMDA [tmda.net] and politely tell the sender I'm not sure who they are, and I get a lot of spam, and could you please click this link to prove that you're a real person.

      I've been using this three-step system for eighteen months now, and out of over one million messages that have come into my mailbox (really), exactly FOUR spam messages have made it all the way through. Apparently the spammers decided to go ahead and click on the little link, or they used a real person's return address, and when that person got they autoreply, they were too stupid to understand what was going on.

      Even better, I have not received ANY indiciation that I've lost any messages; at least, no one has ever mentioned anything about an email that I didn't get.

      I've got five other people at my domain using the same system, although for not quite as long (one for fifteen months, three for about a year, and one for just a month now); they have all had similar success.

      So based on those numbers I'd estimate a success rate of 99.9997% for eliminating spam (which is, admittedly, COMPLETELY INSANE), and a false-positive (or at least "lost message") rate of 0% so far (fingers crossed). A few people have had to confirm their messages, of course, but I've whitelisted them as that happens.

      I actually wrote all the connecting code in PHP, believe it or not, with a MySQL database as a backend. It's invoked using .qmail files. PHP is indeed good for things other than web pages; and was a little bit easier for me to maintain and deal with than Perl. The whole thing is less than 25KB of code. There is also a web backend which I use to configure it; that adds another 40KB.

      The whole system took about twelve hours of programming to set up, on one Saturday.

      Now, for correspondence to companies (such as Microsoft, or Amazon.com), I use a different scheme (although it's handled by the same PHP code). I create up a unique email address for each of them, which ONLY allows mail to or from that domain (for example "rptamazon@mydomain.com" only allows messages from amazon.com). Those addresses are also easily cancellable, individually, if the company starts to annoy me with spam. Basically, each email address can be assigned its own unique whitelist, and can be cancelled individually at any time, through the little web interface.

      I also have a number of email addresses for things such as customer support for our company (I write computer software). I'm using the same system for those, also, but instead of checking whitelists based on the sender, I've found a simple way to do it is to check for ANY of our product names anywhere in the message body or subject. If the message doesn't mention any of them, it sends a simple autoreply back similar to that in (3) above, but mentioning that the message didn't seem to be about any of our products, but if it was, please click here, blah blah. We don't have a high volume of support messages (about one or two a day; we're a small company) but in the last year only three or four people have had to click through like that, and, honestly, their support requests were so f*cked up anyways that I'd rather it just dropped them on the floor. ;-)

      Then, as a very last ste
      • Re:Great News! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by WebCrapper ( 667046 )
        I'd be interested in seeing the scripts you have setup for a project I'm involved with. Any thought of sharing?
      • Interesting. I've personally found that SA doesn't do well on "word salad" spams, base64 encoded spams, spams with numbers / special characters / intentional misspellings ("V!agr0"),
        random word HTML ("<frank>&ltmoon>") etc. Nigerian scam spam seems to get through waaayyy too frequently.

        What I have found very useful is the DNSBL's that block known spamming IP's (spamhaus.org) and all email from dynamic addresses. This cuts 95% out before SA even sees it. With a whitelist system in front and SA
        • Re:Great News! (Score:3, Informative)

          by kidlinux ( 2550 )
          Do you use sa-learn to teach SA about new spam? I have spam tagged email dumped to a Spam folder on my imap server so I can go through it and make sure there aren't any false-negatves. I then move all the spam to a shared folder and run an sa-learn script on it nightly.

          Currently I have amassed 3681 spams totalling 76 megs. I should probably empty that directory sometime :P

          sa-learn makes a big difference though. Helps with the misspellings and random junk. Havn't seen a Nigerian scam come through eith
          • Or... you could strip out all your personal information and either make those 76megs available for others to train their spamassassians or make the SA database available...
        • Re:Great News! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mkettler ( 6309 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @09:12AM (#9536783)
          Word salad I can understand (if you bayes isn't aggressively trained at least).. I don't have problems with it, but my bayes is very heavily trained. (100-300 spams a day manual training)

          What I don't understand is the base64 problem.. One of the first thing SA does is decode base64. Even "rawbody" rules get base64 decoding, so really base64 encoding shouldn't make a difference at all, as SA never examines the encoded text.

          As for the intentional mis-spellings of V!agr0, check out antidrug.cf (use google) or wait for SA 3.0 which includes this set of rules as a part of the standard distribution.

          Disclaimer: I am the author of antidrug, and thus do have a bias here.
      • PLEASE tell us where we can get these PHP scripts and the accompanying mySQL schema. And any glue or config files explaining how this runs.

        I didn't see any references to ClamAV in here, but since its integration with SA is documented in other places, that can be an afterthought.

        When you run your own mail server, it's easy to trump Google, Yahoo and MSN's recent multi-GB offerings. Wonder if they can top my 100GB mail account. Not that I've ever gotten more than 1GB mail worth reading in my almost 20 ye
        • Yes, I would definitely like to make this stuff publicly available; I know a lot of people would be interested. I need to find a good way to do it. I'm a bit worried about drawing needless attention to myself by releasing such a thing--for example, the system is NOT foolproof, so I could certainly see myself becoming a target for attacks and such.

          Hopefully I'll find some free time later this summer (two big big programming projects I'm working on now are ending next month) and I'll see if I can take a we
      • Third step: If the score is less than 20, and the person wasn't whitelisted, run the message through TMDA and politely tell the sender I'm not sure who they are, and I get a lot of spam, and could you please click this link to prove that you're a real person. ...

        So based on those numbers I'd estimate a success rate of 99.9997% for eliminating spam (which is, admittedly, COMPLETELY INSANE), and a false-positive (or at least "lost message") rate of 0% so far (fingers crossed).

        Yeah that is COMPLETELY INSANE

      • Apparently the spammers decided to go ahead and click on the little link, or they used a real person's return address, and when that person got they autoreply, they were too stupid to understand what was going on.

        I respond to those all the time. I politely send a "please don't auto-reply to forged spam" message. It's not my fault that your anti-spam solution is stupid enough to re-define an email reply to mean that you should accept forged mail.
  • by vespazzari ( 141683 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:09AM (#9535407)
    For those looking for the official spam assasin site here it is [spamassassin.org]

    The link in the text goes to some search page
  • by lorcha ( 464930 )
    Anyone know when Spamassassin 3.0 is going to be released? Some spammers seem to have outsmarted 2.63. I'm really excited to see what changes they have made to up the ante in teh war on spam
    • by chathamhouse ( 302679 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:31AM (#9535751) Homepage
      3.0.0pre1 was made available last week.

      It will apparently take another month or so to finalize the weighting of the rules.

      I've put 3.0.0pre1 on a production system that filters ~350k messages per day. With some tweaking of the RBL, bayes, and AWL rules, it is much (~10%) more efficient at tagging spam than 2.63, which I'm running on a parallel server that also sees ~350k messages/day (load balancing is your friend).

      More info: http://www.au.spamassassin.org/full/3.0.x/dist/bui ld/3.0.0_change_summary [spamassassin.org]
      • I've put 3.0.0pre1 on a production system that filters ~350k messages per day. With some tweaking of the RBL, bayes, and AWL rules, it is much (~10%) more efficient at tagging spam than 2.63, which I'm running on a parallel server that also sees ~350k messages/day (load balancing is your friend).

        Just out of curiosity, that sounds like you're running it on your mail gateway. How do your users set their spamassassin options to adjust their filter settings, or do you just give everyone a global setting?

    • Re:3.0? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Brian the Bold ( 82101 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @05:03AM (#9536000)
      Have a look at the Rules Emporium at:

      [rulesemporium.com]

      I use the rules there, and even minor spam gets obliterated with no problems of catching real mail.

      I recommend it!
  • DSpam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pinball Wizard ( 161942 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:21AM (#9535440) Homepage Journal
    After using SpamAssassin for quite a while, it just wasn't cutting it - 75%-80% accuracy is still a lot of spam to go through and delete. I added DSpam to my mail server and my spam catching rate is now better than 99%.

    DSpam also came with much better directions for integrating with Exim than did SpamAssassin. As fond as I was of SpamAssassin, they have some catching up to do.
    • There was no clear way to integrate dspam with my postfix gateway as with spamassassin. Lots of instruction on setting it up with a local mail handler but not so much for a relay host.

      Maybe there's a way to do it but I couldn't take the time to figure out a good way to get it done.
    • Re:DSpam (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:53AM (#9535525)
      DSpam 3.0 is definitely not easy to set up. Add to that there is a database that needs to be set up on the back-end, and lots of configure flags at compile-time, plus permissions issues, etc. etc.
      It's also not very easy to understand how it works, or configure your mail client to easily train it, or to configure procmail how to properly call it (there are a lot of command-line flags as well).

      That being said, IT IS WORTH IT. A properly set up and trained DSPAM filter will SOLVE your spam problem. Training time usually takes about 2 weeks and the results are fantastic after that.

      You can also set it up a number of ways - server-side, user-side, with postfix or another mail server, with procmail or without. Relay or not. It's up to you.
      • I'd say that SpamAssassin is neither very easy to configure.

        It has a lot of perl module depencies and integration of with MTA was documented quite poorly when i tried to install S.A.

      • Re:DSpam (Score:3, Interesting)

        I have to say I had the same problem with SA missing a lot (mind you, I have yet to upgrade to newer versions), and Dspam solved it. Having said that, I still use SA as a "first pass", and delete any mail with a score of >9 or so (I would put it lower, but any false positives and users would complain). This leads to less mail in the dspam quarantine.

        It's a bugger to set up with Procmail, but if anyone wants a peek at my config file, just e-mail... One thing I did do was forget about that whole "forward
        • Yes, the whole spam-user@domain reporting thing is too confusing for non-techs. I also created an IMAP folder for all users on the mail server, which my Postfix/Amavisd-new/ClamAV/DSPAM gateway nfs maps to said IMAP folder, then cron feeds every hour into DSPAM. Works quite well. So well I'm afraid to upgrade DSPAM for fear of breaking everything!!!
    • Re:DSpam (Score:3, Informative)

      by prockcore ( 543967 )
      I added DSpam to my mail server and my spam catching rate is now better than 99%.

      I haven't seen any false positive stats on dspam. It's easy to say a spam filter has a high spam catching rate, but it means nothing without a very low false positive rate.

      Redirecting my mail to /dev/null gives me a 100% spam catching rate.
      • Re:DSpam (Score:4, Interesting)

        by fyonn ( 115426 ) <dave@fyonn.net> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:35AM (#9535756) Homepage
        I've only had dspam installed for a week or so but my stats are as follows: I've taught it 43 spams (ie from a database of nothing, 43 got through and I've trained on them) and 1 false positive (an itms reciept)(again taught to the system) and since then it's been pretty damn good. it's flagged 632 spams and let 730 innocent spams through correctly.

        I've got my system set to deliver spam to a spambox which I check nightly for false positives.

        and the docs say that I ought to have alot more training before it's up to standard. it's already better for me than SA was.

        dave
    • How was spamassassin configured on your mail server? I get better than 99% with spamassassin and so far only one known false positive for the year I've been using it.

      However, I might be switching over to Exim soon from qmail, and I'll be sure to check out dspam.
    • by Cato ( 8296 )
      Did you turn on SpamAssassin's Bayesian filtering? I found that this is generally good as long as you train it on enough ham and spam. SpamAssassin uses Bayesian filters, rule-based filters, black lists and Razor style services, so it's generally proof against spam that gets through several of these defences. I get something like a 99% hit rate these days.
    • Well, I still use SpamAssassin, some 30 spams a day, no false positive, and 1 false negative in a month or so. Why is it so successful? I have spent a lot of time training it's Bayesian filter on both ham and spam. That's the key to success for any spam filter nowadays..
    • I have to admin a groupware server and a Spamassassin milter that I've placed in front of it. I throw out anything that scores more than 15 points and tag anything that scores over five. Autowhitelisting and the built-in Bayes filter are enabled. I've even dropped in a selection of third party rules.

      This all works pretty well but a trickle of spam still gets through to the end users. I've set up conferences on the groupware box where users can drag missed spam and mistagged ham to for training. Here i
    • Re:DSpam (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Chief Typist ( 110285 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @10:42AM (#9537291) Homepage
      The best feature of DSPAM, in my opinion, is that the SPAM never leaves the mail server.

      The bad messages go into a quarantine on the server and can be reviewed by the end user using a web-based interface (looking for false positives.) In the press of a button, that quarantine can be emptied, freeing up disk resources on the server.

      Other SPAM solutions (like SpamAssassin) mark the message and continue with delivery. What's the point in downloading the SPAM to your mail client just to throw them away?

      -ch
    • If you scour around for good filters and such, you get get SA up to 99.7% or so in my experience.
  • by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:30AM (#9535463)
    If only it truly assassinated spamers.
  • by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:30AM (#9535466) Journal
    See, i'm not interested in Assassinating Spam. Now if there was a SpammerAssassin, then I'd be all over using that.
  • by Hollins ( 83264 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:32AM (#9535471) Homepage
    What do you do with mail SA has flagged?

    I like SA, and find it is very good for identifying around 95% of my incoming spam. However, I also have around 0.1% false positive rate, which means at some point I have to look through all the filtered spam messages and make sure none of them were legit.

    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.

    A good set of procmail and formail rules will accomplish this, but my hosting company has a weird procmail setup and I'd prefer something easier to implement.

    Any ideas?
    • by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @02:03AM (#9535553)

      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.

      • If you integrate it with your mailer, you can reject the mail during the SMTP session rather than generating a separate bounce email, which would have the problems you mentioned (going to a forged from: address). As an added bonus, when you reject it during the SMTP session, you'll get taken off a lot of spam lists, since your address will look like it had delivery problems. And you still get the advantage of bounces, that legitimate mail that got rejected will end up with a bounce back to the sender info
      • Auto replies would also get your address marked as 'confirmed valid' i.e. able to receive emails, even if you don't read the spam, so you'll probably just get even more spam.
    • by David Jao ( 2759 ) * <djao@dominia.org> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @02:08AM (#9535570) Homepage
      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.

      I can't speak for auto-replies, but you can do the sorting part client-side. The key is that spamassassin adds a line like "X-Spam-Level: *****" where the number of *'s is the score of the email. Almost any email client can filter mail to different folders based on headers. The unary representation of the spam score ensures that even a primitive filter can work.

      For example, one popular client is Microsoft Outlook, and there are several web pages in google (such as this one [carleton.ca]) that explain how to reroute mail to specific folders depending on the spamassassin score.

    • I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side.

      Yes, you sure do.

      Odds are that this doesn't apply to you, but the Mac OS X mail program, Mail, does a brilliant job. It recognizes the YES or NO header that SpamAssassin adds to filtered messages and, depending on your preferences, filters accordingly. By default it merely flags spam messages with a little trash-bag icon and leaves them in your inbox. At the flip of a switch, you can have the program automatically move spams into a Junk folder that (again, depending on your prefs) can be automatically emptied every week or month or day or whatever.

      If your mail program doesn't already do this, then your mail program sucks. ;-)
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:04AM (#9535687)
      Sending an auto-reply on scores between 5 and 10 (or any other range) makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

      I have a very well known address (which is why I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward :-) that receives many hundreds of messages every day. My mail server deals with about half of the spam I get. Well over half of the rest is autoreply responses from idiots who don't understand that *I* never sent that message in the first place -- the from address was forged by a virus.

      The correct response to spam is to throw it away. Trying to reply to it makes the world worse, not better.
    • by antsquish ( 320643 ) <ajmawer@@@optusnet...com...au> on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:57AM (#9535800)
      I know you mentioned procmail, but for those using Courier IMAP's maildrop, here's what I use in my ~/.mailfilter for SpamAssassin. I've just pasted the relevant sections, but it logs all deliveries, I then filter known recipients into their own folders (not shown here), then any unknown messages are filtered through Spam Assassin. Messages with a score > 10 are sent to /dev/null, while others are delivered to a spam folder.

      logfile "/path/to/my/home/dir/maildrop.log"

      ###
      ### Maildrop variable substitution
      ###

      MAILBOX="./Maildir"
      DEFAULT= "$MAILBOX"
      SPAM="$MAILBOX/.Spam"

      ###
      ### SpamAssassin :: filter out spam mail
      ###

      # Filter through SpamAssassin
      xfilter "/usr/local/bin/spamc"

      # Handle messages marked as spam
      if ( /^X-Spam-Flag: YES/ )
      {
      # Store messages flagged as spam in another folder; uncomment
      # this during testing just in case any legit mail gets sent
      # to /dev/null
      #cc "./spam-store"

      # Delete messages with a score of 10 or higher, filter all other
      # spam messages into a spam folder
      /^X-Spam-Status: yes, hits=![:digit:]+\.[:digit:]+!.*/
      if ( $MATCH2 >= 10.0 )
      to "/dev/null"
      else
      to $SPAM
      }
      • For a little more complicated, here's my spamassassin-relevent rules from .procmailrc (Note I've got actions I'm not currently using.):

        :0fw
        | spamc

        # Marks extreme spam, and handls one of several ways.
        :0
        * ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
        {

        #First report it as spam to the athorities.
        :0c
        | spamassassin -r

        # :0
        # For complete deletion...
        # /dev/null

        # :0fw
        # Remove markup...
        # | spamassassin -d

        # :0
        # For sending to the FTC
        # ! uce@ftc.gov

        :0
        # For when checking highspam...
        $MAILDIR/.caughtspam.highspam/

        }

        :0
        * ^X-S
    • This is something that you need to do at the MTA level, so unless you control the MTA, there isn't a lot you can do.

      In your situation, I would simply suggest saving messages above 5 to a special folder and forward messages above 12 to Dave Null.

      As others have mentioned, never, never send auto-replies or configure your MTA to send bounce messages.

      If you want to reject messages, you have to do it in the SMTP dialogue with the spammer or his raped relay. If you accept the message first, or your ISP does

  • by FireBreathingDog ( 559649 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:46AM (#9535507)
    Everyone on Slashdot always seems to be complaining about spam. I don't see what the big deal is. I enjoy receiving e-mail from people and companies I don't know. Each morning when I run my e-mail program, it starts downloading, and the unexpected e-mail is a pleasant surprise that brightens my day. Well, a few hundred pleasant surprises that is, and they brighten my day in the same way that stepping in a pile of dogshit brightens my day. A few hundred times. So what the fuck? Why are all you whiny bitches on Slashdot always complaining about spam? Don't waste your time writing or deploying spam blockers. Enjoy life. And relax. Assholes.
    • I enjoy receiving e-mail from people and companies I don't know.

      I have a gmail account and I haven't gotten a single email in a week. Not one. Kind of makes me want to post my email address to a news group.

      Kind of.
  • by Enlarge Your Penis ( 781779 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @01:55AM (#9535530)
    I don't employ Spamassassin or any other spam blocker. As a result, I now have a penis that will make her scream, hot lesbian schoolgirls lusting after my every move, a wide range of generic drugs, 2 PhDs and a completely clean credit record

    A step up from living in your parent's basement and whacking off to an inflatable doll, right?

    I'd stay and chat, but I have to get back to a Nigerian man about a bank transfer
  • by Univac_1004 ( 643570 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @03:13AM (#9535710) Journal
    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.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      1. Send out spam pointing to competitor's website
      2. Watch them get sued/fined/DoSed/whatever
      3. Profit!
    • What I had suggested in other posts regarding spam is this:

      Let the FBI actually buy something from a spammer, trace the money, as its being bought with a CC, then prosecute whoever cashes the CC transaction. They do buys for drug busts routinely, so why not.
    • 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.

      I'm not sure why so many people on Slashdot think this, but when you have a good idea, it doesn't mean the other ones are bad.

      Your idea is good. The cops should indeed go after spammers exactly as you say. However, that won't get all of them. One recent spam I got was sent from Brazil, advertises a site hosted in China, and transfers the money t
    • There are 3 main costs to spam
      Server - CPU/Storage
      Bandwidth
      User time to read/sort it

      User time is expensive.
      Bandwidth and servers are relatively cheap
      Email filtering saves the most valuable resource, this helps limit the damage of it. Nobody is saying this is the ideal case, but it is an effective tool.
  • Filtering spam generates way too many false positives. Challenge/Response schemes are IMHO much more effective. TMDA [tmda.net] and similar programs can be configured with whitelists for your regular mail partners, auto-whitelists for everyone who confirms their e-mail identity, and, if necessary, with blacklists too.

    • by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @04:35AM (#9535928) Homepage
      I've been running SA since February, and have had a grand total of ONE false positive out of a few thousand emails. The message was from a new account, very short, and in HTML. That address has since been added to my autowhitelist. SA couple with Amavisd-new and clamav has reduced my spam volume by about 95%, and my virus emails to zero. It's a great product and I'm looking forward to 3.0.
    • You've been using the wrong filter, it seems.

      I filter 97%+ of Spam (~175/day) and the only false positives I get are from companies just begging to be filtered. Ie: Easyjet.com, in the (massive HTML) conformation of my itinerary trying to sell, sell, sell me hotels, car rentals and the lot.

      Those companies should realise that Spam is a problem end even though they are not spammers, they should keep in mind their messages will be sent through a filter, so better make sure they don't look like it.

      I have nev
    • Challenge/Response is fundamentally broken. For more information, take a look at some discussions on the topic from debian-user: here's one [debian.org]. There's a few google-harvested discussions [netcom.com] on the topic too.
  • Not perfect, then again, spam prevention methods never are.

    What I do [whirlpool.net.au]

    • As a side note, I don't use these email addresses for personal emails - I can hopefully trust that the people I personally send emails to are not, or are not going to become spammers.

      Well, that is not a very secure assumption. Unless you know that all those people are not using an MUA/OS combination that is vulnerable to viruses or worms. Harvesting addresses is done that way nowadays...

      • The people I trust with my "hidden" personal email address are also people I trust to run a patch MTA/MUA. Of course, they also have my personal phone number, if they need a different way of contacting me, when email doesn't work.

        If I don't trust them to run a patched MTA/MUA, then they'll get one of my "special" ie. sacrificial subdomain email addresses, rather than my actual personal one.

        A key point, which I didn't realise when I wrote the original text at the URL, is that nothing is permanent, includ

        • nothing is permanent, including my physical address, my phone number or even my name.

          Now that makes sense ;) It's actually a great idea.

          Imagine the repercussions on the legal system if we could switch IDs in real life every now and then! Change your bank account, diplomas, contracts... would be quite difficult. Unless you have a secret unique ID stored on some government computer. Connect to that server, and change your public name anytime you like (after paying a fee?).

          $ ssh <my_unique_id>@id

  • by gfody ( 514448 ) on Saturday June 26, 2004 @05:05AM (#9536005)
    not all bulk mail is spam. spam assassin gives 2.4 points if it finds anything that looks like a unique identifier for X-Sender, and another 1.4 points for anything that looks like a tracking image or tracked link.

    that plus the points for any non-safe html colors or any html at all, SA effectively tags ANY bulk mail as spam!

    For an end user to setup on their client (as a "junk mail" folder) thats great.. I like to have bulk mail seperated from my personal mail, but for an ISP to throw it away before it even gets to the intended recipient is fucking rediculous and should be illegal.

    The only email an ISP should be allowed to discard are the ones with attached viruses or some known email worm. The only reason your customers are happy with you throwing away their email is because you don't fucking tell them.
    • but for an ISP to throw it away before it even gets to the intended recipient is fucking rediculous and should be illegal.

      Thank Microsoft. ISPs could easily just add a header line and let the user filter on it, but Outlook Express is crippled from Outlook in that it can't match on arbitrary header lines, forcing ISPs to delete or leave alone.

      I agree that SA is great client-side, which is how I use it. The problem is that it isn't plug-and-play on even *IX, and it's not trivial [openhandhome.com] to set up on the client s
    • Never been a problem here, and my parents are on quite a few mailing lists where they get these kinds of messages. I'm still at 0.01% false positives.

      The point is, there are also many rules that give negative scores for especially hammy messages. So, messages can have a lot of very spammy things about them, but as long as they also have a lot of hammy things about them, you're ok.

      Also, be sure to train your bayes database well with a lot of ham, it'll help a lot too.

    • My one email account uses SA, but does not auto delete.
      Evolution just files those with high rankings into another folder.

      I don't think auto deleting emails is a good idea.

      Yahoo does a similar thing, throws suspect spam into a bulk folder. Quite often I find stuff (website registrations) in there.
  • Many people use spamassassin on unix boxes, or if they have Exchange they use SA on a unix gateway between the net and the Exchange system.
    But if you are a smaller shop and don't have the resources for that, then you can run sa right on Exchange.
    Here is a write up on how to do it [spamblogging.com] (that particular write up is for Exchange 2003 and SA 3.0, but it will work for SA 2.x as well, and for Exchange 2000 - or any combination thereof - but it won't work on Exchange 5.5 that I know of).
  • See, I've realized that spammers get my address because of my own behavior. I changed my address and started protecting my it responsibly, and have not received spam in two years. Count 'em. Two years. Ya'll are whores playing fast and loose with your personal information and then crying when you get herpes.
    • You're just plain lucky. It's a fact of life that at least one of your email pals will use Windows, and store your emails in an Outlook or Outlook Express mail folder. Some days later, your pal will catch a worm or virus, and this little spam helper will harvest all those addresses, including your beloved, "protected" addy.

      • Oh, I do get virus and worm infected e-mails. However, none of those infections have resulted in true spammers getting ahold of my address.

        I don't worry about the infected e-mails because my filter is 100% effective at screening them out. I really don't consider infected e-mails to be spam because the purpose and intent is entirely different than spam-for-profit.

        • The problem is not that you can screen/filter viruses on your side, it's that your pals won't on their side; and once a virus on your pals' machine gets your address (from their addressbook or mail folder content), it will send this address to harvesting servers, which collect all new addresses. It is then just a matter of time before you start getting tons of spam too. You didn't disclose your address, but some virus on your pals' machine did it. You have absolutely no control over this, once your email le

          • >It is then just a matter of time before you start getting tons of spam too.

            I guess time is on my side then. I get plenty of infected e-mails. Probably 200 Beagle variants alone. None have resulted in my address being harvested by spammers. I believe you are mistaken about viruses and worms harvesting addresses. (Got some documentation?) By definition, I should be spammed out by now.

            The problem with using virusses and worms to harvest addresses is that "the powers that be" will analyze the infectio

            • The problem with using virusses and worms to harvest addresses is that "the powers that be" will analyze the infection and identify where the addresses are being sent to.

              Don't overestimate their investigative prowess. It is actually quite easy to send back the addresses where they can be collected:

              • Post them on USENET
              • Put them on spammer's P2P networks (some zombies are great at this)
              • Hide them in spam itself.

              As for the last point: you can add the addresses as plain text in the spam payload,

              • > spammers can collect the information in all anonymity

                You've provided no evidence. Sure, anything is possible, but that's hardly an argument. Show me evidence that spammers are using worms and viruses to harvest addresses from infected users' address books. If they were, by all rights, I should be swamped with spam.

                • Yes, I didn't provide evidence, because the only evidence I have is source code from a grey-hat workshop experiment which establishes a stealth P2P virus/worm-based network (in a lab environment) which does exactly that harvesting stuff I was talking about. This self-spreading, self-organizing and self-healing network code must never be released in the wild for reasons you certainly understand.

                  Coding this is very easy for experienced people with shellcoding, sockets-api and openssl experience. It's not di

                  • Yes, I take your word for it. You have convinced me my inbox is loaded with virus and worm-induced spam. I don't know how I ever got by without a spam filter. I must go out and buy a spam filter now. Must buy. Musy buy. Brains. Must eat brains.

                    Proof is in the pudding.

                    • Look; sometimes, with your non-disclosure strategy, you'll get lucky. It looks like you did. Congratulations.

                      Other times, maybe your hosting company will let slip your email address. Maybe one of your friends will send you one of those goddamn Yahoo E-cards, and Yahoo will have your address to sell at will. Maybe one of your friends will fill your address in one of those "Forward this article to:" fields on a commercial news site; do you trust the site? Maybe one of your friends will normally send an email
  • think of some monster inside a giant larval sac when they said incubating?
  • Is there a good spam filter I can install on my personal computer? I guess it has to involve setting up a mail server on my machine just for my incoming mail, but I'd be ready to look into doing that if it would help.

    My ISP is using SpamAssasin, but I have no influence over the setting they use, and it lets far too much through.

    I assume a server solution is better than a filtering client. Besides, it would make it possible to filter for both computers in the household.

    I'm on Mac OS X.
  • As it seems now obligatory to mention anti-spam systems whenever a /. story mentions spam, I thought I'd add the following:

    Please have a look at Spam Cannibal [spamcannibal.org]

    It's an interesting concept that if correctly deployed (big "if") by even a relatively few admins around the world, could really make a difference to the amount of spam on the net. It can also protect hosts against DoS attacks of various kinds.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not astroturfing this (much...). It has flaws - there are those who think blacklis

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