Anti Spam Landscape

[Peter McNabb]

On Jul 17, 2007, at 4:47 PM, Kimball Larsen wrote:

> So, I'm setting up a new mail server from scratch, using ubuntu on  
> a new, fast server.
>
> In the past I've used spamassassin + postgrey for anti-spam, but  
> lately it's not keeping up anymore.  I've run across DSpam, and  
> wondering if it's any better.

(No, this message is not a week late... it's probably because of  
greylisting.. :) )

In the CS department at BYU, we use the spamhaus blacklist + DSPAM +  
ClamAV. DSPAM was a little tricky to set up (permissions were  
nightmarish), and has mixed results. My own account that uses it does  
really well: 99.5% accuracy for 13,000+ messages (I haven't seen a  
spam message for over two months... unless Michael Torrie's emails  
count as spam. I've gotten a lot of those recently ;) ). However,  
other users who do the training are only getting ~70% accuracy. There  
is a way to set up a group account that everyone uses, but I haven't  
yet tried that. I use spamassassin for my mcnabbs.org account, and  
have pretty good results there, too; maybe one or two spam slip  
through each day.

Since some people are not getting good filtering with DSPAM, I'll set  
up spamassassin and have both as opt-in.

-peter