[clue-talk] Triaging spam

[Chris Schock]

Spammers misspell words on purpose to avoid both keyword and bayesian
filters. Same reason they put those blob of common words at the bottom.
Those words statistically water down the ad portion of the email.

While nothing is perfect probably the best solution you can get will be a
combination of whitelists, greylists, and blacklists at the front end and
then some sort of optional bayesian filtering at the backend.

I've tried a lot of procmail based filters, and all of the ones I have
tried have been lacking.

According to RFC's unwanted mail should actually be rejected rather than
accepted and silently (at least to the sender) discarded. If more mailers
actually did this, maybe it would help as admins saw a barrage of reject
messages in their logs.

ASSP-SPAM is an SMTP relay and does a pretty good job but it has a certain
quirkiness and I'm not sure how much support the project has right now
since last I heard John Hanna (the person that wrote it) stopped
development for personal reasons. And unless you control your mail server,
this won't be an option.