Email & Spam

This page should really be all about email processing. These days, however, spam processing is what email is all about. On my machines, I see about 90-95% spam.

This page isn't sorted out yet, it was a big enough section from New Items, and a hot enough topic to make notes about. There are also a good selection of email-oriented items in the Email and News section of my software page.

Instant summary ... you really want a combination of tools and strategies working for you to cut down the spam.

  1. You need to keep your email addresses from ever getting onto spam lists ... so they never spam you.
  2. Must reduce volume of incomming spam and connections to your mail servers so they and your bandwidth can survive the load.
  3. Try to sort out valid email transmitters from invalid ones.
  4. -- All the above is really important, because it is relatively cheap and reserves your bandwidth. The steps below cost you bandwidth, memory, storage, CPU time, etc -- Relatively Cheap -- the spam load is so high that even the cheap part can bring systems down.
  5. Look at the content (body) of emails which get through the above layer, classify them as spam or not.
  6. Safe valid emails and spam.
  7. Verify spam/ham to train trainable things.
  8. Provide access to spam emails so users can verify they are spam, and pull out the (it always happens) ham message from spam.

Software

Mail Transport

MUA and MSA/MSP

Add-Ons

Sendmail Specific Things

Notes

Milters and Mail Filters

Tools to help sort out valid emails and user agents

Sites and Techniques

Dead

If you want to know why these are dead, good places to check are DNS Based Black/Block Lists and SlashDot.

Bolo's Home Page
Last Modified: Wed May 13 16:57:20 CDT 2009
Bolo (Josef Burger) <bolo@cs.wisc.edu>