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fighting spam

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 21:53

2007-10-16
21:53

Is it me, or are these tools hard to get around ? I set up spampd for postfix some day, and mostly things work fine, but I have this feeling it should be blocking a lot more than it does.

For example, I think I configured it to use pyzor, but I have no idea if it's actually doing so. And it's incredibly hard to figure stuff out.

From spampd's website:

spampd is an SMTP/LMTP proxy that marks (or tags) spam using SpamAssassin (http://www.SpamAssassin.org/)

Well, that's great. Nothing mentions how this happens though. Which would be useful for me to be able to figure out which config file it's using for spamassassin. Is it the spampd user ? Is it the stuff in /etc/mail/spamassassin ? root's ?

Even at full debug log, the word pyzor does not ever show up in my mail logs. You're supposed to run spamassassin -D --lint to see if it uses pyzor as if that were the magic bullet to figure out how to get your spampd to use pyzor, but the site glosses over the fact that you running it as your user or root has no relation to whatever process is actually using spamassassin.

Somehow this stuff should just be a lot more transparent.

2 Comments »

  1. Spam Filtering…

    Thomas, for my spam filtering I use Bogofilter in combination with maildrop on my server. I followed this recipe that I improved with my own setup and since I mostly forgot I was receiving spam.

    The only caveat is training the filter for…

    Trackback by Diary of a CrazyFrench — 2007-10-16 @ 22:27

  2. I gave up on SpamAssassin a couple of months ago, precisely because the configuration and tuning are so obscure. I’d been using SpamAssassin for a couple of years, but it had been working on my nerves more and more and too much is too much.

    I migrated to bogofilter which happily comes with no configuration you’d like to change more than once and found that I get really great results with it. I look through my -unknown directory once a day and find that nine days out of ten, I can let cron train it all as spam at midnight. Every week or two, I’ll check the -spam directory (which gets about 12000 messages a month in it). Since I started using bogofilter, exactly seven ham messages have lived in -spam for any period of time. None of them particularly worthwhile either, but that is not really the point. :-)

    Let me know if you’d like to know more about my mail setup. I think most of my dotfiles should be at http://www.paeps.cx/~philip/dotfiles, but I’m not sure if I’ve updated that area since I migrated away from SpamAssassin.

    Comment by Philip Paeps — 2007-10-16 @ 23:05

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