Save me from spams

[Matt Morgan]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 08:53:03 -0800, arora.himanshu at gmail.com
<arora.himanshu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>              I am suffering from serious spam problem. I know that i
> can use spamassassin for this purpose but my system administrator has
> disabled this facility might be he thinks that it would slow down the
> server. I have no way to detect spams. I used procmail, it works for
> 20% of the cases because i used some specific dictionary words to
> check for spam because these mails are related to some particular
> subject. I cannot filter the mails because the mails are from
> different email IDs. The idea of using specific dictionary word failed
> because they used some special characters to represent some characters
> e.g. they used /\ for A. 1(one) or | (pipe) in place I( I for Indigo)
> \/ (backslash and forward slash ) for V.
>             I want a program which is not heavy in terms of CPU cycles
> consumed, which i can run from from my home directory(independent of
> binaries installed on the server). Might be a simple perl script.
> Please reply me from where  i can get this program. It need not be
> very accurate. 70% to 80% accuracy is fine.

The first thing I would do is switch to Thunderbird as a mail client,
and turn on adaptive junk mail filtering (Tools--Junk Mail Controls).
It has an accuracy at least as good as what you need, once it's
"trained," and using it is painless.

Then I would start nagging my system admin about SpamAssassin anyway.
At work I have SpamAssassin plus Thunderbird, and it works a lot
better than Thunderbird alone (which is what I do at home). SA may
slow down the server a little, but you can almost always buy a faster
server for a lot less than the value of the time all the people are
wasting. I mean, the whole reason we have computers is that they're
much better than people at mindless, repetitive tasks. Spam killing is
a job for computers, not people.