[colug-432] in search of spam/phishing filtering that doesn't suck

[William Yang]

Depends on scale, sophistication of users, and similar other intangibles.

I have not received a single spam message at one account in almost 3 
years on a long-lived, widely distributed account that used to receive 
thousands of spam per day.

Ultimately, it was about taking Paul Graham's _Plan for Spam_ to the 
logical extreme: whitelist authorized senders, and quarantine all other 
senders (senders can be email, domain, or regex, because it's in my 
procmailrc).  My quarantine still gets a lot of junk, but not that 
much.it turns out it really is mostly (>99%) junk.  A little automation 
to make whitelist management easier, along with rebuilding my 
.procmailrc, and it's been remarkably effective.

I have educated a number of users (yes, I still have users) at my hobby 
ISP, and they're able to pick up the concepts and efforts reasonably 
well.  With an average age greater than 80, I expected more difficulty, 
but I guess only the hard core folks have stayed with Free-Net that 
long.... ;-)

My wife doesn't like it, my kids do okay.  Your mileage may vary.


On 2016-09-17 18:21, Rick Hornsby wrote:
> I ran my own mail server for several years with spam assassin from the 
> late 90s into the early 00s. It worked well enough if you kept up with 
> the ruleset changes and the like. Most of my handful of users had 
> migrated to other email services around the time gmail came along. The 
> web UI was light years ahead of any other web mail provider, and they 
> were great at filtering spam. I rarely use the web UI anymore in favor 
> of a desktop or mobile client, so the only thing left for me with my 
> gmail account is how long I've had it and the spam filtering.
>
> We've discussed on this list a few times how Google is filtering at 
> least a few COLUG members' emails to spam without good reason, and 
> there seems to be no way around it. Now I just found where Google 
> filtered one of my own emails (not @gmail, but my linux.com 
> <http://linux.com> which is registered under my gmail account) -- to spam.
>
> What are you guys doing for your email as far as spam and phishing 
> filtering? Are you doing something yourself server side? Client side? 
> I've found over and over again in the past (and when it is turned on 
> by default and I don't realize it) that the filtering in email clients 
> sucks, and so I always turn it off. Google has the advantage of 
> bazillions of emails to make a decent guess at what's spam and what's 
> not. Even with that, they're starting to suck at it too. I've been 
> left very confused over the last year or so several times because 
> gmail filters out a single message - or two - from a COLUG thread.
>
> What are your thoughts?
>
>
>
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