From: "Scot L. Harris" <webid@xxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 12:07, Paul Howarth wrote:Scot L. Harris wrote:> The vast bulk of spam can be blocked using a combination of greylisting > and spamassassin. These are not controlled by any central authority so > there is no chance of a central authority causing problems. SpamAssassin does of course use third-party lists in its scoring though, but a listing in just one list is unlikely to cause a rejection. Paul.Only if you use the network checks. Personally I use bayes and selected rule sets from the rules emporium. I found network checks when enabled slows the processing of email to much for my taste. :)
I can't use greylisting since I use our ISP's facilities via fetchmail. So I run with network tests and 40 carefully selected SARE rule sets. VERY little spam makes it through. And VERY little ham gets mis-labeled.
But in combination with greylisting spamassassin does not have to examine very many messages. 95 to 98% of spam messages are rejected by greylisting leaving very few for spamassassin to examine. This actually resolved one problem I saw on a system running spamassassin only, I would occasionally get spam storms with so many messages coming in the email server would almost get swamped trying to run spamassassin checks. Now the server mostly idles since the over head of spamassassin has been off loaded.
If you can do it, Scott is dead right. Greylisting is WONDERFUL,
especially if you do not force EVERY email through the process.
{^_^}
