Spamcop

[RJM62]

I used to get a lot of spam -- about 75 percent of my total email, actually. I don't know what, exactly I subscribed to that got me on all the lists, but the spam was getting ridiculous.

So I installed MailWasher Pro and subscribed to Spamcop, and reported every spam message. It took a lot of time at first, and there was no reduction for a couple of months. Then one day, all of the sudden, my spam took a nosedive. It's now at somewhere around 6 percent of my current mail, and down to 16 percent historically.

This got me to thinking: I wonder if spammers maintain a blacklist of their own of addresses that are known to report spam to Spamcop (or other anti-spam organizations), so they can avoid spamming those addresses. The sudden and dramatic falloff of spam seems to suggest that something like that happened.

-Rich

 

[nyoung]

I finally signed up for Gmail, and have it setup to retrieve email from my domain. I went from 30-50 SPAM per day to none. Maybe one a week, and even that one gmail leaves on the server and marks as potential spam.

Awesome stuff. I couldn't be happier with the transition.

I used to get a lot of spam -- about 75 percent of my total email, actually. I don't know what, exactly I subscribed to that got me on all the lists, but the spam was getting ridiculous.

So I installed MailWasher Pro and subscribed to Spamcop, and reported every spam message. It took a lot of time at first, and there was no reduction for a couple of months. Then one day, all of the sudden, my spam took a nosedive. It's now at somewhere around 6 percent of my current mail, and down to 16 percent historically.

This got me to thinking: I wonder if spammers maintain a blacklist of their own of addresses that are known to report spam to Spamcop (or other anti-spam organizations), so they can avoid spamming those addresses. The sudden and dramatic falloff of spam seems to suggest that something like that happened.

-Rich

 

[wsuffa]

Who is your email provider? Maybe they've started trapping spam....

The thing that made the biggest difference for me (I run my own server) was installing Untangle second-level firewall.... I'm down to a couple of percent a day of incoming.

 

[jesse]

I'm working on building out an anti-spam/virus solution for about 20,000 e-mail accounts. I'll be using amavisd-new, spamassassin, spamhaus, postfix, clamav, and potentially Pyzor and Ryzor. It will replace a rather expensive Barracuda solution.

From my perspective, simply enabling spamhaus on your SMTP front-end will drop about 95% of the spam. I've never had an issue with false positives. (Unless you happen to be located in South Africa and your ISP is a known spammer. That cause issues).

I've played with spamcop in the past but there were just too many false positives.

 

[wsuffa]

Jesse,

Take a look at Untangle - it's got a freeware/open source version that works quite well. I've not used it on 20,000 account system, but it does implement a number of the packages you mention. Can save some work for you...

 

[Tom-D]

It's easier to just simply change your E-mail address.

 

[RJM62]

The particular account that was being spammed was at usa.net (Netaddress is the provider). I have spam filtering from Netaddress disabled on that account because of too many false positives, however.

Jesse, I have Spamhaus and Spamcop enabled on my server, and yes, they do a great job. But the account in question wasn't processed through my server. I haven't noticed an excessive number of false positives using Spamcop.

By the way, Jesse, I have a great PHP script specifically written to filter out contact form spam, if you want it. I plan to offer it as a standalone service to clients whose sites are primarily maintained by someone else. But it practically eliminates robotic submissions with almost no false positives, and no stupid CAPTCHA images, counting cats, or any of that nonsense. But it only works on contact forms.

-Rich

 

[Erice]

When I lived in Nebraska, the education service unit in south-central Nebraska used an open source product called DSPAM on their school-wide accounts. I think they service somewhere around 50,000 e-mail accounts. While I was only as an end user, and not a system admin, I noticed it cut down my spam very significantly. It does have to be trained, however, and that process might be laborious for a casual user.

You should check it out if you haven't already. The people who understand the mathematics and algorithms to the science of spam filtering said it was on target.