OT: E-ChannelNews - Do We Really Need This?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>Quoting Fairlight (Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:32:44 -0500):
>[...]
>> > Mine is definitely on the rise.  I get about 2000-3000 per week thrown
>> > into my "held mail" folder for suspected spam.  There are almost zero
>> > false-positives.  (There are far more false negatives -- sometimes a
>> > few dozen in a day, though usually less than ten.)
>>
>> Ouch!  Mega-glad Kel and I have solutions in place for this.  Legitimate
>> email eats up enough gaming time as it is!  :)
>
>I've used SpamCop for just over 3 years now for filtering.  My "held
>mail" folder is approaching message number 315,000.

I know you're using SpamCop since our server has been blacklisted by them
on occassion :-).

We're using postfix, amavisd, and clamav, to eliminate worms and phishing
attempts before they ever get to the mailbox, and spamassassin to grade the
rest.  Mail exceeding a user-defined spamcop scores is put in IMAP spam
folders depending on the score where one of the folders may be DROP which
says send mail with scores higher than some limit to /dev/null.

We have a cron job that sends a message summarizing what's in the spam
folder, showing the Subject, To, From, and Date info for each message.  The
user can set the frequency of these messages specifying daily, or a list of
the weekdays for the messages.  The messages give a URL for the webmail
interface so they can manipulate IMAP folders if they normally get their
mail with POP.  They can then copy/move mail from the spam folder to other
folders like spam.whitelist, and these folders are scanned every fifteen
minutes to update the user's bayesian filters or add From addresses to
whitelists in their spamassassin user_prefs file.

At one of our ISP customers with about 7,200 mail users, their primary
public mail server rejects about 700,000 messages a day using a variety of
DNSRBLs and postfix filters, and accepts about 200,000 messages for
delivery.  A significant portion of the accepted messages are spam which
ends up in the spam folders.

I see perhaps 20 messages a day in my spam folder.  These messages have
spamassassin scores between my required_hits, now set at 4.00, and my drop
score which is set at 10.00.  Before I started dropping messages above the
limit, I would see about 300 messages in the spam folder per day.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

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