Like anyone running an email server these days, spam has been a major problem for me over the past year. Late last year, the problem only got worse when the bastards behind all that pump-and-dump stock spam really opened their taps. Since then I had been struggling to keep the inboxes on my server from being overwhelmed with crap. Well, I've recently made significant improvements, and although it may be a little early still to proclaim outright victory, I am going to take credit for a major blow to the shit-spewers; in the context of my server, anyway.

I've relied on SpamAssassin for spam filtering ever since I first felt a need to filter spam. Over the years there has been a clear, yet unsurprising, pattern to its effectiveness. After a new release, SA is deadly effective at spam filtering, but after some time (during which the spammers presumably test their spam against the latest release and tweak it to evade the default ruleset) it begins to miss more and more spam. I have gotten used to adding my own rules and tweaking the SA scores to help prop it up a bit between releases, but that has yielded mixed results. These days there is sa-update, which can help avoid to erosion of effectiveness, but that isn't what really turned the tide for me.

Posted by ra in computerish at 02:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)