Anti-spam

[andrewducker]

I've just discovered that (a) Thunderbird has whitelisting, and won't make as spam anything from people in my address book and (b) I can tell it to automatically move any email from people _not_ in my address book into a separate 'unrecognised' folder.

I've now got three filters set up:
1) Everything with ****SPAM**** in the subject line gets junked (that's put there by SpamAssassin on the server, if it scores over 5 - I haven't noticed any false positives in over a year).
2) Everything from LJ gets stuck into the LJ folder.
3) Everything not in my address book gets dumped into "Unrecognised".

This should leave my inbox for things from people I know.

Now, if only there was a way to run these filters intermittently, so that when I check my email from the web client or my phone it's already been filtered, I'd be happy.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Run your own mailserver - IMF installed on my Exchange server gets rid of most of my spam before it hits any of my devices or webmail.

It's got so good that I've actually cancelled my Cloudmark subscription.

[andrewducker]

Well that's what Spamassassin does for me - I get to see about 6 piees of spam a day, down from over 150.

[andrewducker]

I went and looked IMF up - looks impressive. The results here aren't quite as good as SpamAssassin, but still pretty good.

I'm occasionally tempted to run my own server, but I can't actually be bothered spending that amount of time running hardware/software when other people will do it fairly cheaply.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Running things your self isn't such a bad way to do things - our server is a copy of SBS2003 running on a home-assembled Athlon Shuttle box.

It does the job in more ways than one - we have a central file store, we have a mail server that filters our mail before it gets to the client, we have web mail (with phone synchronisation to Blackberry and Windows mobile), and we have a single place to keep all our MP3s.

We also have a box we can write about, which helps!

[andrewducker]

You install experimental software on your main server so you can write about it?

<HanSolo>You're braver than I thought</HanSolo>

If it was just me I'd be tempted to give it a go - but I share a mail server with my family, and I don't fancy explaining to them that I installed Spam-Eater++ and it ate all their mail.

Maybe when I'm rich, famous and spending more time at home.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Ah, no - experimental stuff goes in VMs - what I meant was we can write about day-to-day server administration.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I too run my own server(s), and I do find it incredibly useful. I don't actually run email for me - mainly due to a) lack of a good internet connection, and b) lack of willing to spend dosh on getting an FQDN. Spam assassin is good; we use it at "work", and I've found it more accurate - and, where not, erring on the right side of caution - than the competition.

And my configuration in Apple's Mail is almost exactly the same - 'cept "Unrecognised" is "!lj" :).

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Have you a URL to how to set this up - I'm running Thunderbird as well, but find my ISP's auto spam filtering next to useless as it gets a lot of false positives.

[andrewducker]

Tools->Message Filters
New
Give it a name.
Set the first combo box to "Sender" and the second to "isn't in my address book" and tell it where to put things that match that.
Also:
Tools->Junk Mail Controls
Tell it to White List things in your address book
Move incoming messages mark as junk into a separate folder
Go the the Adaptive Filter tab, and make sure it's on.

For a while, you'll need to correct whether mails are spam or not, but it learns fairly quickly.