[cap-talk] [OT] email spam

[Eric Northup]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 16:23 -0500, Eric Northup wrote:
>> There are other alternative.  One that has worked well for the jhu ACM 
>> is greylisting -- a list of known non-spam (origin email addresses, 
>> origin email server, destination email address) tuples is maintained, 
>> and incoming email matching a known good tuple is processed as usual.
> 
> Yes. That can work quite well, but given the number of people subscribed
> to these lists I don't have time to do it.

The ACM uses postgray ( http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/ ), which 
automates the process.

Judging only from its list of dependencies, it seems like it might be a 
pain to set up (dunno, never tried it).  And it requires that you run 
postfix rather than sendmail.  But it has been largely fire-and-forget 
at the ACM, and has resulted in about a 10x drop in spam.  Combined with 
a conservatively configured spamassassin, it's quite effective.

-Eric