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

[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" :).