Spam Actions

Jim Levie jim at ENTROPHY-FREE.NET
Wed Sep 11 21:51:58 IST 2002


On Wed, 2002-09-11 at 14:35, Julian Field wrote:
> At 18:40 11/09/2002, you wrote:
> >Are you saying that an SA result and an RBL result will simply be
> >treated as "spam" w/respect to bounces? Or can one specify one action
> >for an RBL result and a different one for an SA result? In my opinion
> >the later is what is needed to be able to notify users of why their
> >message wasn't delivered.
>
> Done.

Very, very cool
>

>
> I chose "*" rather than "#", but done. And no, I'm not going to bother
> adding a config option just to set the character. I'm sure you can cope
> with "*" :-)
>
I used # rather than * because some filters implement wild card or regex
matching and the * has a special meaning there. So far as I know right
now a # doesn't have a special meaning to any filter that I've run
across. It's something to consider, and yes I'd find that to be a
trivial edit...
>
> I appreciate your feature request, but could you possibly word them a
> little more gently? Remember I do this for nothing, I'm not some mega-corp
> you can make demands of. Hope you understand.
>
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound harsh or pushy. I guess it's a character
flaw. I've been working with email systems since the days of UUCP only
mail and like everyone else have been fighting a growing Spam problem. I
tend to be a bit opinionated on some of the issues as a result of that
history.I really do appreciate the work that you've put into this and
continue to devote to it. And, if you need some "extra hands" I'd be
glad to assist in any way that I can. I'm a fairly decent Perl
programmer and have a good knowledge of email (esp. Sendmail).

As an unsolicited testimonial to your efforts some of the places that
I've deployed MailScanner were using commercial products for spam
control. They weren't satisfied with the results (too many false
positives and too much spam getting through) so I installed a
MailScanner filter in between the commercial package and the rest of the
email system. MailScanner identified about 30% of the already filtered
mail stream as being possible spam with very few false positives. As a
result the number of complaints from their users about Spam pretty much
disappeared. Those clients are ecstatic over the results, and even more
so when cost is compared and are discontinuing the use of the commercial
solution. And we are talking about moderate sized mail volumes,
something in the 150-180,000 messages a day inbound from the Internet.

MailScanner is handling that kind of load nicely on a dedicated 2x2Gz
box with 1Gb of memory. Compared to the other scanners that I've
evaluated (everything from lower end commercial ones, not Brightmail
it's just too pricey, through the open source variants) MailScanner is
way out in front. In terms of code quality, features, and robustness
nothing else that I've looked at comes close.
--
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
   Jim Levie                                 email:
jim at entrophy-free.net



More information about the MailScanner mailing list