Decius wrote:
] I thought I would post and see what people's experience has
] been with various spam filtering tools. A few comments:
]
] 1. I see spam as a law enforcement problem. The VAST majority
] of the spam I receive contains forged headers and is being
] relayed through systems without permission. If the government
] simply enforced the laws it already has, it could prosecute
] these people for computer fraud. This would eliminate most of
] the problem that I see. The reason that I get all this spam is
] because the government won't enforce their laws. (Although
] they are happy enough to raid internet "bong" dealers. Gosh
] I'm glad to be safe from them.)

Agreed. The big problem is that a lot of it comes from abroad and you need to get the US govt to armtwist Korea, China, Russia, etc.


] 6. This morning I was considering implementing Challenge
] Response for all of my email. This sounds like an effective
] solution. Unfortunately, its not. The problem is that there
] are a number of bots out there, mostly related to ecommerce
] sites, that I probably do need to see email from. I can try to
] list them in my whitelist, but I risk missing something.

PGP is a similar solution -- only accept signed mails -- but lacks critical mass to work. A little weaker than this: I use qmail and often give ecommerce sites addresses like bucy-amazon@gloop.org, etc. Sendmail supports bucy+amazon ... don't know about other MTAs.

] What systems are you using? How effective are they?

I've been using SpamAssassin for awhile now. With a threshhold of 5, I don't think I've gotten a single false positive and I'd guess that the false negative rate is maybe 10%.

RE: Spam Filtering