OT: Dropping sp4m volume?

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005, Bob Stockler wrote:
>Mark Luljak wrote (on Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 03:43:33PM -0400):
>
>| Hi all...  Anyone not interested in fighting spam can delete now.  :)
>[snipping stuff about spam decreasing]
>| 
>| Anyone else notice whether spam has stayed relatively consistent, risen, or
>| dropped off in intensity in the last 8-12 months?  I'm curious if it's a
>| general trend, or if my own blocking may have something to do with it.
>| 
>| Seems odd that spamming would just stop or drastically slow all of a
>| sudden, especially after the CAN-SPAM act was enacted.  So, what are the
>| other admins out there seeing in terms of consistency of volume?

I'm seeing somewhat fewer rejections on our mail servers here, particularly
a reduction in the number of hosts that are rejected 1,000 times or more in
a 24 hour period on any one server (we still reject over 30,000 attempts
per day per server).

I suspect that CAN-SPAM doesn't have much to do with it.  There have been
some major convictions on fraud recently, and Scotty Richter put his
optinrealbig operation into Chapter 11 with the bankruptcy papers showing a
$20,000,000USD liabiliity to Microsoft, presumably a result of one of their
suits against him.

Some broadband providers have started to clean up their acts after AOL
basically told them to or be banned from their network.  The spam problem
is largely zombified Windows machines on these broadband networks where
their Microsoft virus, Windows, has had servers installed which then go
back to their masters for work to do (probably sending the contents of the
owner's address books as well).

>I use IgLou as do you.  I don't _think_ they filter any email
>before I pick it up.  But I know they do add to the headers of
>my incoming email X-Warning-RBL lines from (or through?) sites
>that are on their many blacklists (or sites that maintain black-
>lists?).

We're using postfix, amavisd, spamassassin, and clamav on most of the mail
servers we support.  We configure the system to drop any worms (AKA
viruses), defang suspect attachments, and mark SPAM so that it's easily
sorted with procmail, deliver, or other MUA filters.  One thing I've found
very interesting is that clamav catches many ``phishing'' e-mails as
viruses, and they get dropped which is beneficial for us non-Windows users
who don't really need a mailbox full of notices from banks and eBay.

Bill
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