Re: SPAM fighting is a thankless job!

> Thanks for the suggestion, and I will check out SpamPal for my own
> personal use.

End-user filters certainly don't save you bandwidth or storage space in your in-box, but they can keep it away from invading your eyeball space.

Another suggestion if you're a small domain owner, but registered at GoDaddy, is to use them as your mail forwarding service, and their aggressive filters will take care of a lot of the spam before it has to bounce off your own filters.

> However, in my experience implementing an anti-spam solution for a
> multi-billion $$, 65,000+ employee company, any software that just uses
> RBL lookups is typically going to be somewhat unreliable (especially
> depending on which RBL service you use).

Depends on your definition of unreliable, but corporate solutions usually need to err on the side of less-aggressive filtering if the cost of a false positive is high.

> The unfortunate fact is that most companies, and certainly many
> individuals, don't know how to properly configure DNS or their email
> servers. The result is that they get added to RBL's and they don't even
> realize it. Then, people who use RBL lookups as their only means of
> filtering out SPAM, will never get email from these sources.

I see very little downside in that, but my needs are different than many corporations. If they can't configure DNS or their mail servers properly, I might see very little need to get their email. And my bounce message would say so. :-)

> In fact, a new employee at the company I work for put up a new email
> server and didn't lock it down from being used as an open relay. The
> spammers found it almost overnight and we were added to about a dozen RBL
> databases. It took me several days to get ourselves removed and in the
> mean time, there were a lot of business partners who could not receive our
> legitimate business related email.

Your business partners could have whitelisted you, but you had faulty processes in place if a new server was allowed to go live without being checked first. I do sympathize for you - and assume the employee was chastized and new checks and balances put in place.

> The result is that I ended up choosing a product we could host in-house
> that involved two hardened Linux appliances in our DMZ which filtered most
> of the messages based on keyword and Bayesian analysis and they also
> checked for email-borne viruses. Then, those appliances pass the remaining
> message traffic to two more servers inside the firewall that are running
> Email Firewall for Windows from Tumbleweed Software. That software uses a
> whole slew of spam analysis technology, including Tumbleweeds own Dynamic
> Anti-SPAM Engine which is actually updated several times each day by
> engineers in their message lab based on hundreds of reports of missed spam
> from various clients and "honey pots" they have around the
> country.

Excellent! Not cheap, but then the alternative is also not cheap. What if a nasty kiddie porn spam gets past some poor filters, into the in-box of an employee who then gets traumatized, unable to perform their job duties, and goes out on disability, hysteria, or files a lawsuit against the company for allowing sexually-harassing emails to get to their eyeballs? That's the justification I use to help pay for good filtering and administration.

> Unfortunately, all this was VERY expensive and not typically available to
> a Schmo like me. :-)

> Sorry to be so long winded, but since you indicated you are a professional
> spam fighter, I thought you might be interested in that little story...