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05/07/2003 Archived Entry: "A lesson in Spam"

Took a couple geekleaps today, and am currently playing with Spamassassin. I first installed in in April 2002, and it's been loyally marking my spam for over a year...but getting worse and worse at it while I've been getting more and more spam.

So I did a few things: 1) change my regular email from greg@... to gwebster@..., 2) fix how various emails address that I have appear on the web, and 3) update Spamassassin.

I expect #1 will have a decent impact, but I will still get a fair bit of spam from other addresses.

#2 is simply because the spambots are getting better - email@NOSPAMdomain.com is no longer effective at preventing them from auto-parsing your email. So I've done things like email@thedomainyougotthis.from. The bot would have to be pretty damned smart to get that covered. The thing that really pisses me off about this is that obviously people who do this both understand how spambots work and are willing to do things to prevent spam, like reporting it to the postmasters and upstream providers. Spammers do themselves NO favours by parsing this stuff. I report every single spam I receive, spammers would help themselves by getting me off their lists, not trying to make sure I am on them.

It was silly of me not to have done #3 a long time ago. Spamassassin has changed dramatically. It's gained Bayesian (self-learning) filtering, better and nicer configuration, and much ease of use for users. The easiest way I've found to update this on any system (including the rather annoyingly never-updated Debian) is, as root, "perl -MCPAN -e 'install Mail::SpamAssassin'". I suggest doing this every month or so.

Replies: 2 comments

Nah...look into 'spamassassin -r -w name'. That does the majority of what I need. If something is really aggregiously bad, I'll manually report it to the postmaster and abuse email addresses, though I'd say that's about one in 30-50. Posted by Greg @ 05/08/2003 05:02 PM PST