Re: IMPORTANT: your message to html-tidy
On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 07:49:36AM +0100, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 11:07:39AM +1000, Craig Sanders (cas@taz.net.au) wrote:
> > Percentages:
> > spam:non-spam (25512/29605) 86.17%
> > accepted spam (382/4475) 8.54%
> > rejected spam (25130/25512) 98.50%
> >
> > i'm reasonably happy with that. 98.5% of all spam was rejected
> > outright. only 382 spams (1.5%) made it through my postfix access
> > lists, RBLs, etc to be tagged by spamassassin.
>
> I'd argue that differently.
fine. on YOUR system, argue it however you like. on MY systems, however, MY
rules apply.
> You've blocked a total of 6016 mails of 55,117 attempted deliveries,
> based on the IP address of the sending MTA's IP address.
you can't count, you can't read, and you can't reason, either. i have no idea
where you got your numbers from, they bore no relationship to the stats i
posted. i blocked 25130 out of a total of 29605 messages. they were all spam.
a further 382 spams got through and were identified and tagged by spamassassin.
furthermore, you don't have access to my mail logs, so you can't see all the
obviously spammer email addresses that were blocked.
> That's a broad rejection policy.
it's a very effective rejection policy. it keeps spam off my system and out of
my mailbox.
> As many people have noted, for pretty much _any_ given IP, your odds are good
> that most of the mail received from it is spam. It doesn't do much for the
> legit mail that comes through. Given that we now _do_ have good
> content/context based filters for assessing spam likelihood for a given mail
> item, blind use of RBLs should be discouraged. It's the same sort of
> thinking that's causing no end of trouble for people trying to communicate
> with AOL users:
i use spamassassin as a content filter. i also use my own blacklists, access
rules, RBLs etc to reject spam during the SMTP session. this minimises the
amount of spam that SA has to process (i have thousands of custom SA rules, not
just the default ones), minimises the amount of spam that makes it through to
my mailboxes, and minimises the number of undeliverable spam bounces clogging
up my mail queue.
that first point about minimising the work that SA has to do is significant.
by using other anti-spam methods as well as SA, i reduce that workload to
approximately 1/67th of the total amount. this helps to keep my home mail
server working (on obsolete hardware with very slow old disks) running under
the unreasonable load that spam imposes on it....it's perfectly adequate for my
legit mail load, but is not adequate if it had to process the deluge of spam -
over 6 times as much spam as legit mail.
craig
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