public blacklists

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 13:01, D. D. Brierton wrote:

> 
> Well I am running Spamassassin anyway, although I haven't upgraded to
> FC3 (and hence Spamassassin 3.0) yet (still waiting for Fedora Extras).
> I am looking forward to upgrading to Spamassassin 3.0 as quite a few
> spam messages are getting through now, even with Bayesian filtering.
> Blacklists were appealing because I was hoping I could get Postfix to
> reject some messages before they even got to Spamassassin, but as my
> Postfix isn't really working like a proper mail server and just does
> local delivery and relaying to my ISP's SMTP server I guess there isn't
> much more I can do.
> 

You can always install spamassassin 3.0 from sources if it is not
available via rpm.

You may also want to check out the SARES web site.  They maintain a
large number of additional rule sets that can help detect spam.  They
are easy to add to your system and they have a method to pull updates
automatically (I just update manually as needed).  

I also believe they had patches to incorporate SURBL support into 2.64
(and maybe 2.63 but you probably want to run 2.64 now if you are not
running 3.0).

The SURBL option examines the URLs in the spam messages and checks
various block lists.  If they show up on the block list the score is
increased appropriately.  

Unfortunately unless you control the MTA there is no method I know of to
reject or drop a message before you process it.  Spamassassin is about
the best option.

One suggestion, set things up to run spamassassin only on non mailing
list messages.  That will improve the speed of email processing on your
system.  I have seen very little spam in the mailing lists so this seems
to be a reasonable process.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the
management of them.
		-- La Rochefoucauld