OT - Mailing List Admin question

Norbert Hartl norbert at hartl.name
Sat Nov 10 12:05:24 UTC 2007


On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 11:52 +0100, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
> Brad Fuller schrieb:
> > I started the UI mailing list, and that makes me the admin. The
> > mailing list is rcv'ing a ton of spam that I have to take care of
> > everyday. Do other admins find the same thing on their lists? If so,
> > what do you do about it?
> >
> > brad
> >
> >
> >   

> My experience is that spam can be blocked quite effectively at the mail
> system's SMTP server, using DNS-based blocklists and a huge and growing
> local list of IP ranges from which no legitimate mail can be expected
> (mostly dynamic IPs - DSL and dialup).
> 
> I'm using postfix, but DNSBLs are usable in qmail as well which is used
> on lists.squeakfoundation.org.
> 
> This is no silver bullet, of course, but it should reduce the amount of
> spam to be dealt with by a significant margin.
> 
In my experience the most effective spam prevention is to use
greylisting [1]. Next is text heuristics. I have some email addresses
which are older than 12 years and I think it's assured they are
one any avalaible email list. I used to get up to 200 spam mails
a day (and this was 3 years ago). I tested some things over the 
year and now I use all together. My experience shows that greylisting
prevents 95%-98% of all spam. Spamassassin is doing the last 2 %.
Tarpitting [3] and IP blacklists are good helpers anyway. So no reason
not to use them. Today the situation has completely changed for me.
Half of the days I get no spam at all. On the half I receive up to 
2 spam mails a day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpamAssassin
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_%28networking%29

Norbert




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