Don Marti

Fri 02 Jun 2006 10:29:40 PM PDT

Rick Moen vs. Spam

Rick Moen reviews his anti-spam setup. SpamAssassin at SMTP time via sa-exim is excellent and is the only thing that gives me a case of Exim envy.

Rick is currently not using greylisting, but I am. The Postgrey greylisting implementation for Postfix doesn't need MySQL, and I probably wouldn't be greylisting if it meant I had to put RDBMS client support on the mail server either.

Rick also has a good blockquote from Karsten Self about the idea of "proportional response" to spam at the IP level. I'm thinking about this too: after greylisting an unknown SMTP connection where the other end was trying to reach a spamtrap address, temporarily running that IP address through an iptables chain that would drop most of the packets. Basically make each message sent to a spamtrap "cost" 20-100 times as much bandwidth as normal. And I doubt the spammers are sitting around with Ethereal open.