[SLL] [SLL} Re: Anti-spam methods

Bill Campbell bill at celestial.com
Sun Jul 29 21:42:51 PDT 2007


On Sun, Jul 29, 2007, Glenn Stone wrote:
>On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 04:04:32PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
>>On Sun, Jul 29, 2007, Glenn Stone wrote:
>>>On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 05:06:58PM -0400, Nicholas Bodley wrote:
>>>Challenge-response kinds of anti-spam don't work very well in corner cases.
>>>Consider the case of two people attempting to exchange email, each of which
>>>has one of these critters configured.  The first sender elicits a challenge,
>>>which runs into his own challenge-response mechanism... *boom*.  Or, even
>>>simpler, the case of "I need help, I'm getting on an airplane and I need an
>>>answer by the time I land..."
>>
>>Many serious anti-spammers consider C/R to be abusive, if not
>>spam itself because of the blowback produced.
>>
>>I've found bayesian filters with spamassassin routing messages
>>above a user-specified threshhold going into a spam folder for
>>review to be very effective in minimizing the effects of spam
>>without false positives.  I will drop messages entirely with SA
>>scores above some high limit, say 20.0 without fear of loss.
>
>I've found that a well-trained SA implementation can safely kill anything
>above 10.0 without fear.  Sometimes I'll get an FP as high as 7.something
>with SA, but very very rarely.  
>
>>Spamassassin also allows one to whitelist senders so their
>>messages are given a high negative score.
>
>How is this implemented, per-user .whitelistrc or something?  This is very
>useful... 

Simply add ``whitelist_from e-mailaddress'' entries to your
$HOME/.spamassassin/user_prefs file.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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