E-mail spam

[mtbc]

This month I have been receiving more spam so I concluded that it is time to risk increasing anti-spam measures. I no longer graylist, partly because it was a hassle to maintain with some large services retrying delivery from a new host each time. Instead, I periodically download lists of miscreants' IP addresses and have the firewall redirect their incoming deliveries to a tarpit. I have now added FireHOL's level 2 list to those I redirect away from my MTA: at least based on a small sample, it includes the IP addresses of many hosts that recently spammed me. I wonder which lists others favor.

Comments

[mindstalk]

Do you use a Bayesian filter?

[mtbc]

I don't. Though, my mail server is pretty lightweight, processor-wise; I'm using OpenBSD's spamd.

[goldibehr]

For me, the economics are just not worth it to run an email server myself. The cost for yahoo is $20/year. The cost for hotmail is $0.

Microsoft has many faults, but their spam filter on hotmail is the best I've ever seen. It's just not worth personally dealing with the bounced emails and spam problems.

[mtbc]

That makes sense. My server is running a few things, like our household wiki and my website and whatnot, so having it handle e-mail too is little incremental cost, keeps my sysadmin skills more current, and when somebody says they didn't receive e-mail from me I can look at the logs and see the details of their end's MTA accepting the message. It's interesting to hear how good Microsoft's antispam is.