quote, link, spam

[cellio]

Quote of the day: "[Pushing data from Perl to Excel is] sort of like when you've been trying to get two acquaintances to meet and talk to each other, but there's all these mishaps that occur, and finally, they talk, and get along pretty well, until one day one realizes that the other one talks too fucking much and segfaults in their face." (dr4b, here)

ISN: Clark defends domestic psi-surveilance program (by osewalrus).

I keep getting spam claiming to be my "last chance" for the offer du jour. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means. The amount of spam reaching my mailbox has gone down, but the amount that's trying to get there is up again after a dip for a few weeks. I have four layers of protection; since the beginning of Shabbat (two days) the statistics are:

• Bounced by pobox.com on my behalf: about 475
• Held by pobox.com as suspicious (all actual spam): about 60
• Caught by SpamAssassin as almost certainsly spam (score 7+): about 120
• Caught by SpamAssassin as probably spam but worth looking 'cause sometimes it catches legitimate mail (score 5+): about 40
• Made it to my inbox: about 50

Currently I skim the pobox bounce reports every few days because I toughened the rules a week or so ago, but obviously that's not viable long-term. (I check the "held" pile every couple days; that catches legitimate mail occasionally, but then I can whitelist those senders.) Some of the obvious spam that gets all the way through has low SpamAssassin scores (2 or 3); I'm not sure how they're pulling that off, but dropping the threshold that low would catch way too much legitimate mail. I don't know if better tuning of all the parameters is possible, but so far pobox is doing the bulk of the work and only rarely catching legitimate mail (in the "held" pile, where I can get it back).

Comments

[geekosaur]

After a bit of training, both Evolution (which uses SpamAssassin behind the scenes, but trains its Bayes network) and Mail.app do a really good job of detecting spam.

[cellio]

Are those applications or services?

My mail goes through pobox.com first (redirection) and thence to the spool on a Unix box, where I read it with pine. I have procmail available. Can either of the options you mentioned fit into that pipeline?

[geekosaur]

Evolution is a GUI mailer for Unix; Mail.app is the mail program that comes with OS X.

But you can hook up a personal SpamAssassin setup with procmail, then save your spam and train it periodically with sa-learn; this will be much more reliable than an untrained SpamAssassin like most ISPs use. IIRC the Mail::SpamAssassin docs tell you how to do this.