This is a great overview of what the Spam Assassin folks are doing to combat spam.
Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics
I get SO MUCH SPAM it’s incredible. I’ve sadly given my address out to too many people and have posted it on too many websites. But I dont want to change it, so it’s either filters at the server (a la Razor, Spam Assassin, etc.) or a whitelist service, which I also dont want to do.
Do any of you get a whole lot of spam (in my case it can be 2000 per day) and if so what do you use to combat spam?
I didn’t want to give up my address either. I had used it for 8 years and it had become part of my identity in a way. But, unfortunately, because the filters are not perfect I still had go to through the “probably spam” folder and manually check there were not any false positives and after several months of 300+ spams a day I finally decided I just had to give up and use a new e-mail address
I couldn’t justify the drain on my time or the depressing feeling of getting abused.
There are a few things I have done since then. One is I never give out my e-mail address to a company. Since I run my own domain I can make forewarding addresses for free I make one for each and every company and/or website I sign up to. That way if I start getting spam from a particular company, one I can turn it off and two I will know never to do business with that company again.
Another is I will never post my address anywhere ever again if I can prevent it.
The only problem in my scheme so far is less tech savvy friends sending me e-mail birthday cards from disreputable companies using my new e-mail address. I can only pray.
I have some way to go before I get 2,000 a day, but spam accounts for more than 50% of my mail by now.
Some time ago, I switched to the Mozilla mail client, which does a great job at Bayesian filtering; it analyses the stuff I earmark as spam, learns from that, pattern-matches incoming mail, and shunts spam into a spam folder before I ever see it. Obviously, it isn’t perfect, but it yields very few false positives.
The combination of Spam Assassin on the server-side, ClamAV and Thunderbird’s Bayesian filtering seem to work wonders for me. I get maybe a total of 5 SPAM emails a day in my Inbox after my filters take out approximately 1000.
This is a kind of mix of spam filter and challenge/response so as not to miss any really important emails:
Use a spam filter on the server side. But set a special rule — have another email address that you never check send a message to the spam sender that says “Your message was filtered as spam. If you didn’t intend it to be spam, please send the message to [here I link to my email address in an image file] with the headline NOTSPAM.” Then I have another filter that white-lists anything that says NOTSPAM in the subject.
You might need to do some procmail stuff (which is what I did) but it depends on your setup.
I used to do it that way, but recently, I turned all that off and just use the OSX Mail.app filter. It actually works really well. I scan the spam folder once a week or so, sorted by subject, with “arrange by thread” turned on. I can delete the spam messages pretty quickly and rarely ever see anything I want to keep. But the method I describe above would work best for large volumes of spam.
Hope this helps, but might not serve your needs.