spam filtering

[cellio]

I use SpamAssassin scores and procmail to cut the flow of spam to my inbox, but more and more spam has been getting through in the last couple months as -- I guess -- the spammers get more crafty. I haven't invested effort in examining what's going on; I'm using the lowest SpamAssassin thresholds I can without generating too many false positives.

But I use pobox.com (a permanent forwarding address), and a week or so ago they turned on spam filtering at their end. They don't throw suspected spam away (at least not right away); they buffer it and give you the chance to look at headers and decide what to send through. They also offer a whitelist, so if they tag something as spam that wasn't you can at least flag that sender as being ok. I haven't looked to see if I can make it interact with mailing lists.

In the last few days Pobox has caught about 200 messages for me. Three of them weren't spam. All three were from Yahoo mailing lists. (Yahoo adds ads to messages.) I think this is great! I don't know what rules Pobox is using to identify spam, and I assume that most of that spam would have been flagged as spam by my direct provider if it had gotten that far, but maybe not all of it would have. And I'm all for dealing with the problem at the earliest available step in the delivery process. It saves wear and tear on my provider, after all. (Providers, actually; I mirror my mail stream against the possibility of outages.)

Pobox was already worth the (roughly) dollar a month I pay for a permanent address, but this makes it even more worthwhile.

Comments

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Which version of SpamAssassin are you using?

[cellio]

Hmm, that's a good question. My mail headers don't record a version number, nor can I find the information in my provider's spam FAQ. I'm guessing fairly recent, because JTAN (my provider) is pretty active in staying on top of both spam and viruses, but I don't know.

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Also, do you get information, in your spam, as to what specific tests triggered spam identification? If you know where to look (or have a friend who does, *hint*) that may also help identify the version.

[cellio]

You mean info like this?

X-JTAN-AntiSPAM: spam, SpamAssassin (score=5.213, required 5,
autolearn=disabled, DEAR_SOMETHING 0.80, FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS 0.52,
HTML_20_30 0.50, HTML_MESSAGE 1.00, MIME_HTML_ONLY 1.00,
MSGID_FROM_MTA_HEADER 0.00, SPF_HELO_PASS -0.00, UNDISC_RECIPS 1.39)
X-JTAN-SpamScore: sssss