SPAM reduced by about 60 to 70% [Updated]

By: Luc de Louw

The filters implemented today are working quite nice. The first milestone is reached.

Since approx. 13:30 UTC+2 lot of mails are rejected with a permanent error. You can proof that on the statistic tool I installed on the server to monitor the amount of mail, spams and rejects.

Most of the rejects are happing because of Spamcop DNSBL hits, but also the basic filter rules like fully qualified sender domain and such helps a lot.

Not so surprisingly, there have been only a small amount of hits for the attachment filters which include almost all Windows executables, because most of them have been already filtered by the filters mentioned above.

As a positive side effect, the mail queue is not that large anymore, because mailman has to bounce less emails to faked senders.

Up to now, there are no false positives. So far, so good. If you experience troubles, just drop me a mail.

Further I installed and tested amavisd-new and spamassassin which was working a bit too much, means that emails have been checked twice - incoming and outgoing. I'm working on a solution for that. As the Debian Sarge package are quite old, I'll probably going to turn it on when the system is upgraded to Debian Etch, like planned.

Update:

As you have noticed there have been an outage of the mail list and news service. Mails have not been lost, since SMTP servers just retry to send messages again. NNTP Users just noticed a connection error. You also can clearly see the outage on the mail statistics.