[PLUG] spam traps and solutions

["Sean C. Sheridan" <scs@CampusClients.com>]

For the last 12 years I've been using email.  At one point it was actually
useful, but it's really becoming a burden.

Up until last week I was doing a fairly good job of trapping spam, most of
them end up in my Spamassassin (SA) trap.  This week is a different story.
 I'm now getting 300-400 spam per day that do not get trapped.

These new emails are short and, of course, use forged headers.  Many of
them score 6-6.5 on the SA filter, my cutoff is set at 7.0.

I like the direction Meng's "Sender Policy Framework" was headed, but has
it been adopted universally?

I do not like the "use gmail to filter it" approach for a variety of
reasons the most important being I don't have any interest in sharing my
private email with a public company who will store it and search it at
their discretion.

"IMPORTANT NOTE: Spam Assassin is not 100% reliable.
It usually does a pretty good job, but it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you
DO NOT just discard mail that Spam Assassin has flagged as spam. Rather,
save such messages to a separate file or folder where they can be reviewed
once a week or so to check for messages that aren't really spam."

I just do not have time to look through my 27,000 currently trapped emails
to see if I am missing an important new client request.

I could just refuse all the things SA thinks are spam, but then people
argue that is a bad solution that leads to endless loops and bandwidth
consumption.

note:
It is uncommon that I'll get legitimate email from overseas, but uncommon
is not equal to never.  Some of our biggest accounts came from Europe and
Africa via email inquiries.

Before I go back to the dark ages and turn off email completely... which
I'm strongly considering, is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

I suspect I'm not alone.  In fact I've argued for years that email is one
of the biggest burdens on American business creating untold hours of
inefficiency.

Does anyone have a good solution that I can implement on my fedora box
that will trap the crap and never create a false positive?

I've received 15 spam in the time it took to write this email, please save
me...


Sean C. Sheridan
scs@CampusClients.com

Campus Party, Inc.
444 North Third St.
Philadelphia, PA 19123
(215) 320-1810, xtn 117
(215) 320-1814 fax
http://www.CampusClients.com
http://www.CampusParty.com
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