On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 21:11, D. D. Brierton wrote: > fetchmail, postfix, and procmail (although procmail does very little, I > let Evolution do all of my filtering into folders). > > But I do pull my mail using fetchmail, which means it ends up via > postfix and procmail in /var/spool/mail/darren which is where Evolution > finds it. > Ah. Then greylisting won't do you much good. The way it works is when a remote MTA (or spammer) tries to send you a message your MTA issues a 415 error (temporary error message) and saves the remote MTA's IP address, the sender address, and the recipient address as a tuple. A delay is imposed so if the same MTA tries to send the same message again before the delay has timed out it will get another 415 error. After the delay period when the MTA tries again the message is accepted. Depending on the implementation that particular tuple can be auto whitelisted for 24 hours or whatever you decide to set. So any additional email from that source will not be delayed. For legitimate email message will be delayed but will still get through. The actual delay is dependent on the remote MTA's settings. Spammers on the other had typically don't queue up a message and resend it. After the first 415 error they just move on to another message/system so you never hear from them again. With a delay value of just a few minutes you get as good a result as if you used 30 minutes for the delay. > > If you really don't want to have to wade through the spam > > that spamassassin marks for you try greylisting. > > Yes, I've read up on grey-listing a little, and I think I've seen a post > or two on this list about it. The trouble is that I'm not sure if it > would work for me. (But I haven't had a chance to look into it > properly.) > Since you are using fetchmail it won't work. Sorry. > I get between 200 and 300 a day. But the trouble is that all the mail is > retrieved by fetchmail, from servers where its already been accepted. I > don't know if grey-listing would work in those circumstances. > > > Since implementing this I have been able to get back to doing real work > > instead of fighting spam so much. :) > > Spam doesn't make too much of an impact on my time, but it really does > on my mood. I'm not sure which is worse. Sometime I feel myself just > getting really angry when I'm going through the spam folder. I know I > should try and chill more, but spammers really irritate me. It's the > sort of anti-social behaviour that just chips a few degrees off of the > quality of everyone's lives. They really piss me off. > > Best, Darren I am with you on that! I just don't understand why there are enough people out there answering this crap to make it worth the time and effort to send it out. Have never been able to understand that. I have been using spamassassin at home via filter in my email client. About once a week I clear out the spam folder after checking it and feeding to sa-learn. I get maybe 4 or 5 that slip through to my inbox. And I can't remember the last time I had a false positive. At work with greylisting the spam problem has all but gone away. Highly recommended if you can set it up. If all MTAs implemented along with spamassassin the spam problem would pretty much be solved. -- Scot L. Harris webid@xxxxxxxxxx Ummm, well, OK. The network's the network, the computer's the computer. Sorry for the confusion. -- Sun Microsystems
