Seems odd, but I don't get any of the SPAM others complain about. Must be the ISP. My VISI.com account is protected by the Postini spam service.

- Hipple Quoting Russell Cattelan <cattelan(a)xfs.org>:

Since we're all giving our thoughts here -- How about using an RBL (Real-time Blacklist) via rblsmtpd on the smtp server in combination with SpamAssassin? Personally I went from getting 300-500 SPAM a day (without any spam protection) to next to nothing (5-10) -- and some days nothing. It's been working fairly well except for the spam sent through mba. Ryan Russell Cattelan wrote:

You might not be seeing them, but RBL is a poor idea because it has way too many "false positives". That is, quite a bit of your legitimate email is going to be considered spam, and you won't get it. Once one spammer borrows an AOL account (and they do it all the time), then all of aol.com is blacklisted in RBL for several days, and nobody at aol.com can send you any legitimate mail. That includes your Aunt Zelda who uses aol, who won't be able to send you email. Here at the university, we have constant fights with RBL because spammers love to fake our return address, and then we cannot send any outbound mail. Or if one student in one dorm room lets their PC get hacked and turned into a spam-bot, that's another reason they'll blacklist the entire university for several days. When you RBL us, any mail sent to you from a list bounces back and often results in your list subscribtion being automatically unsubscribed. This is *NOT* a solution, because mainly it punishes the victims. The sheer quantity of spam seems to have doubled since about Christmas Day. Don't know why, but it has. We use spamassassin. What is unbelievable is that the dozen or so that get throguh to me every day, represents about 1% of the spam that is actually directed my way, so it's really amazingly effective considering the onslaught. We are using a supercomputer-sized system staffed by 1.0 FTE just to run spamassassin and keep it updated. Since Christmas Day, it's been overwhelmed and we are rushing to upgrade it. The email stream overall is now running about 90% spam and 10% legitimate. (This is called "the spam-to-ham ratio" among us who deal with it for a living. Ham is the good stuff.) Write your congressman to urge the United States to really outlaw spam, as Australia has done with some success. The "can spam act" was a sham that actually encourages more spam. If the U.S. can do it so successfully with spam telephone calls interrupting you at dinnertime, then we can do it with email. When you talk to your congressman, ask them to consider the cost to the taxpayers of just the federal government's own spam blocking efforts. It's got to be astronomical, just for the government's own operations. Meanwhile, why not enjoy it? Nearby to you all is the Spam Museum, in Austin MN. Roger Deschner University of Illinois at Chicago rogerd(a)uic.edu ======== Spam, spam, spam, spam. Spam, spam, spam, spam, SPAM! ========= =================== -- Monty Python's Flying Circus ==================== On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Ryan Sinn wrote:

Once one spammer borrows an AOL account (and they do it all the time), then all of aol.com is blacklisted in RBL for several days, and nobody at aol.com can send you any legitimate mail.

I love lurking on this list. I have very little to contribute because you people are so much more knowledgeable about beer; the main focus of the list. I can't tell you how much I have learned by listening to the discussions on the list. But, I too am unhappy about the amount of spam that comes through this list and I think we should do something about it. I have been, and continue to be, an advocate of making the list policy be that we only accept mail from members of the list. This policy change would stop most (almost all) spam. In the past, members of the group felt that that would be too limiting. I am going to ask again if this policy change would be acceptable to the list members. It would require that you fix your "from address" if you have a misconfigured mail program. For most of us it would be a transparent change. On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 07:13:32PM -0600, Mike Moranz wrote: -- bob hain bob(a)me.umn.edu (612) 626-9800