Blocking Spam

[jdow]

From: "jdow" <jdow at earthlink.net>
>
> NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.
> NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.
> NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.
>
> I have told you three times therefore it must be true.
>
> That said read up on fetchmail. It can deliver direct to your machine.
> Then evolution can read directly from the mail directory or, if you
> start dovecot or something like that, it can read from any machine on
> your network. (That is how Loren and I handle our email. It is collected
> on one machine and read on another.)
>
> Fetchmail does the filtering via procmail here. This line in .fetchmailrc
> does it. (We each run our own fetchmail with individual accounts we
> fetch from.)
>
> defaults mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d XXX"
> (Replace XXX with the username. It is probably not necessary but "it 
> works";
> and I've not tried to fix it.
>
> Procmail calls spamassassin with these lines in ".procmailrc".
>
> SHELL=/bin/sh
> DROPPRIVS=yes
>
> :0
> * < 500000
> {
>   :0 fw: spamassassin.lock
>   | /usr/bin/spamc -t 150 -u XXX
> }
>
> (XXX == username again. Perhaps it's overkill. It works. I'm not fixing 
> it.)
>
> The timeout parameter, -t 150, is about right here with a 1GHz Athlonish
> type machine and a lot of network tests enabled.
>
> In the init.d file you can tune the number of children spawned by spamd.
> (It's the same algorithm as Apache httpd.) You can also tune how many
> times a child gets used before it gets killed and a new one is created.
>
> I note my .procmailrc file is much fancier than the above. I have a lot
> of simple "anti-pest" stuff in it such as trolls blacklisted with
> extreme prejudice to /dev/null. Bug me too many times, like the UOL.com.br
> challenge response "thing" and /dev/null happens. {^_-}

One other thing - NEVER EVER use spamassassin or spamc as root. That is
a very bad thing.

{^_^}