From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <2ca63ae02fe6fd23697275bb72c31a7b@tombob.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:07:05 +0100 From: Robert Raschke MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [9fans] need help with improving my spam filtering Topicbox-Message-UUID: cabeab0a-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Hi, I have set up my Plan 9 box to receive email for myself. It's a very simple setup with no relaying, just for my own little maildrop. This year the spam started to arrive in slightly more annoying quantities, and a few months ago I managed to set up the bayes filtering for my email. This worked for a while, but now I am getting more and more spam getting through (mostly because of the anti-bayes mechanism of hiding the spam in a picture and sending it together with random but apparently OK text). So, I'd like to expand my spam stopping capabilities. I have read smtpd(6), ratfs(4), and scanmail(8) but find myself slightly at sea on how to combine these to allow me to filter out some of the more obvious spam. If I understand correctly, I can start ratfs(4) and since it'll read the default /mail/lib/blocked file my smtpd(6) will then block some emails. I can also replace qer(8) with scanmail(8) in my /mail/lib/qmail and therefore block out even more emails. The thing I don't yet fully grasp is how I manage the resulting holding queues and log files and how I properly administer the /mail/lib/blocked and /mail/lib/patterns files. Can anyone point me in the right direction for learning more on how to use ratfs(4) and scanmail(8) for effective spam filtering? Robby PS I guess an alternative approach would be for me to use fresh email addresses for mailing lists every so often. But that feels shortsighted somehow.