[vox-tech] spam greylisting (was: [vox] Posting to the lists)

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Fri 22 Dec 06,  8:04 AM, Rod Roark <rod at sunsetsystems.com> said:
> Hi all,
> 
> I just wanted to mention that due to recent major increases in spam
> activity, last night I've increased my mail server's greylisting delay
> from 15 seconds to 45 minutes.
> 
> What this means is: if you post a message to any of the LUGOD mailing
> lists and have not previously done so within the past 35 days, then
> there will be a delay of 45 minutes or more before your message is
> distributed.
> 
> For more information about greylisting, see:
> 
>   http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html
> 
> And yes, the change has improved things greatly.  For the past few
> mornings I had seen 10-20 spams in my inbox.  This morning, none at
> all!
> 
> Rod

Hi Rod,

I noticed that over the past year, my spam-in-the-box count has increased
from 1-2/week to 2-5/day.  Still low compared to what it was before I went
hog-wild with Postfix anti-spam options, but annoying.

Back then I was getting roughly 400 spams/day, the vast majority being
caught with a combination of:

   * pre-delivery:  Postfix spam options and filters and RBL's
   * post-delivery: spamassassin, bogofilter and procmail

I can only imagine how many spams per day I'm getting today.  I'm too afraid
to turn all the anti-spam measures off to take a look.  However, if the
percentage of spam getting caught by all my measures scaled linearly in the
past year, a double in spam-in-the-box means a double in spam attempts, or
800 per day.  Ick.

I'm at work, so I could only briefly scan the url, but this looks pretty
awesome!  Thanks for mentioning it.  Will definitely take a look at this
tonight.

I was also thinking of looking into SPF.  I know it's flawed, but I'd like
to take a look to see if it might work for me anyhow.  Do you know if anyone
is using it these day?

Again, thanks for mentioning this!

Pete

-- 
How VBA rounds a number depends on the number's internal representation.
You cannot always predict how it will round when the rounding digit is 5.
If you want a rounding function that rounds according to predictable rules,
you should write your own.
              -- MSDN, on Microsoft VBA's "stochastic" rounding function

Peter Jay Salzman, email: p at dirac.org web: http://www.dirac.org/p    
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