[Spambayes] Filters

[Skip Montanaro]

    Phil> I currently run 10 Macs all wirelessly linked and use mainly
    Phil> Netscape Navigator 7.2 Browsers and its associated mail program,
    Phil> we rum OS 10 ( Panther ) and have about 25 pop e-mail accounts
    Phil> which get on average 2000 spams a day total. 

(With that email address I don't suppose you work for SFX/Clear Channel, do
you? ;-)

Phil,

You didn't say where your pop mailboxes are located, but if they are on one
of your Macs, you probably already have postfix installed.  If they are on
another Unix/Linux box, if you don't have postfix, it's easily installed.
It has a number of nice features that help suppress spams.  I recently
started using greylisting on my Linux mail server.  It has done wonders for
the amount of spam that needs to be fed to SpamBayes, and thus makes its job
much easier.  Here's a plot of the number of hams, spams and total number of
messages classified by SpamBayes between November 6, 2004 and April 1, 2005.
I switched from sendmail to postfix in December and on March 25th started
taking postfix's spam prevention capabilities seriously.

    http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/sb.png

To use greylisting w/ postfix you will probably have to upgrade to 2.1.x.
My Mac OSX laptop runs 2.0.10.  The later version is required to use
greylisting in a straightforward way.  For details, start at the postfix
docs page:

    http://www.postfix.org/docs.html

and search for "UCE".  I used this article as the basis for most of my
setup:

    http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_02/focus_spam_postfix/

I use the postgrey greylisting tool:

    http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/

-- 
Skip Montanaro
skip at pobox.com