best practices for fighting spam with Debian?
Over time, I've noticed that the quantity of spam getting through my
Debian mail server has been increasing.
What steps are people taking to minimize the spam problem, especially if
you are using Debian as both mail server and desktop?
The wiki contains details about SpamAssassin[1] and examples of
anti-spam configurations for various mailers such as Postfix[2]. Are
there any new developments in anti-spam that are not covered there?
Could anybody provide updates to those pages? What would professional
mail server admins consider best practice today?
One part of the problem I observe personally comes from having multiple
email addresses. Those spammers who are not already on some blacklist
that I use are able to deliver copies of the same spam to each of my
addresses and so I often see 3 to 5 copies of a particular spamming in
one day. Presumably I could limit these duplicates by disabling some of
the email addresses.
Are there any mechanisms in place that allow members of the free
software community and other power users to identify spammings in
progress and have them blacklisted more quickly? Many of the blacklist
sites don't reveal how people can contribute to them. When I continue
getting multiple copies of a particular spam throughout the day I feel
this was a lost opportunity to blacklist somebody.
How do people deal with MailChimp spam? Almost every other day I find
some company I haven't had any dealings with for years has uploaded all
their contacts, including myself, to MailChimp and started sending some
newsletter. MailChimp seems to encourage this "softer" form of spamming
as a legitimate business model and it happens so regularly that it is
very tempting to blacklist the whole company.
I've also observed there are a few companies in the travel industry who
forcefully re-subscribe victims to their spam campaigns every time a new
booking is made, even if the user already unsubscribed. Even without
the newsletters, a single flight or hotel booking can generate well over
10 emails with advertising pushed under headings like "important
information about your flight" or "reminder to leave a review". So far
the only effective means I've found for dealing with this is using
procmail to put them into a folder for travel, I never look there unless
I deliberately need to find some previous message from one of these
companies.
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianSpamAssassin
2. https://wiki.debian.org/Postfix#anti-spam:_smtp_restrictions
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