What do you use for spam filtering?

[Muse]

I've used Mailwasher free for years but am fed up with its eccentricities.

I imagine there are better freeware utilities out there. What do you use?

I'm using Mailwasher 1.33 free. Here's how it works:

1. You open the program, and if so configured, it goes to your ISP and sees if you have mail for all your mail accounts you have configured to be in the default mail check. You have the program configured to check your mail every N number of minutes, which I keep at 3, but I can click a button to check mail at any time.

2. It displays all the mail in your various accounts (I only check one account, normally).

3. It shows a configurable list of details about the emails, and I include such things as From, To, Subject, Attachments (None or Yes), Received, Account, Blacklist (checkbox), Bounce (checkbox), Delete (checkbox).

4. The program has filtering, and many filters are set up for you by default, and you can edit them and add them. The filtering system is complex and very configurable. You can filter some types of email to not show the emails in your list (i.e. accept the emails, but don't display them).

5. I have the program configured to show any email that the program thinks is a candidate for Blacklist, for whatever reason (it checks against several sites such as Spamcop). If I allow the program to keep the email on the Blacklist, or if I check the Blacklist checkbox myself, the next time I get an email from that sender, I won't see it, and the program will automatically delete it from my ISP's server. It's an option to have formerly blacklisted senders' emails not displayed, and I like it like that.

6. Once I'm happy with my list, I can press a button and the program deletes blacklisted emails (hidden or shown), and opens my mail client (or switches to it), and I manually download my mail to my mail client, which sorts mail into my various folders in accordance with the mail client's filters, which I've continued to develop over several years.

My ISP has spam filtering too, and once in a while I have to go there and change something, but mostly it seems to work OK without my intervention, after I made a few custom filters to allow certain emails through.
- - - -
Do you use something like this? What?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have a central server on my network that "fetches" mail every 7ish minutes from all my pop accounts and delivers it to the proper local email accounts on the server. When it does this the mail follows this path:

pop3 server -> global procmail -> spamassassin -> user's procmail file -> mailbox (or something else if procmail specifies)

I use a custom web based app to add/edit/remove rules to spamassassin as well as each mailbox has a spam-bayes folder which I dump any mail that was not tagged, so each night a job runs and checks those mailboxes to do a bayes learn on it.

To access the mailboxes I use an imap client (not pop3) such as thunderbird to get to the mail. The beauty of imap is the mail resides on the server so its properly backed up and stuff.

For an enterprise environment this would work as well but you'd probably want to use ms exchange as the mail server, though there may be linux exchange compatible server software out there as well, since having it linux based makes the spam filtering part much easier and flexible. Could even go a step further and add a step through procmail to have different scanning stages, so like one program could have the simple job of checking DNS and RBLs, if it fails, then it wont bother going through spamassassin, and just tag as spam, saving resources.

Oh and tag the mail, don't delete it. I hate how some ISPs will filter but delete the mail. I rather get to see the mail so at least if theres a false positive I can retrieve it. I occasionally check my spam folders for any possibly legit mail.

 

[corkyg]

I now use Mailwasher Pro 6.1. It is outstanding. That is my secodnary spam filter. Primary comes from my ISP which provides POSTINI.COM. Excellent. Very little gets through to my POP3 box. Then Mailwasher handles that.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: corkyg
I now use Mailwasher Pro 6.1. It is outstanding. That is my secodnary spam filter. Primary comes from my ISP which provides POSTINI.COM. Excellent. Very little gets through to my POP3 box. Then Mailwasher handles that.

That is similar to what I'm doing, although I don't know exactly what my ISP is using (SBCGlobal). What they have seems pretty effective. My current email address has gradually leaked out into the Spam treasure trove, and now I see a handful of spams daily, ones that got by my ISP and aren't yet in my own blacklist file... (spammers are like HIV, though... always mutating) nothing as bad as for my former email address, though. I think I can probably thank my ISP for having bullied up on spam.

How does Mailwasher Pro compare with Mailwasher Free? I tried it for a week or two, but wasn't all that impressed. It did have a nice feature where you could read the message in the lower pane when the record datails (subject, from, to etc.) was selected in the top pane, rather than having to double click the details line as in Mailwasher Free. But other than that, I don't recall major improvements.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel


pop3 server -> global procmail -> spamassassin -> user's procmail file -> mailbox (or something else if procmail specifies)

Can you use Spamassassin on a Windows based computer?

 

[Gooberlx2]

Right now I just use Gmail's system, and then Windows Live Mail's default as well for anything blatant that somehow squeaks through.

When I paid for my own server I used their spamassassin filter and it was pretty good. However, it's a module for the apache server, I've never seen any standalone app using it.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Muse

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel


pop3 server -> global procmail -> spamassassin -> user's procmail file -> mailbox (or something else if procmail specifies)

Can you use Spamassassin on a Windows based computer?

Not that I know of, but spamassassin is run at a server level (or at least usually is) so nothing stops you from having a windows front end. Like in my setup both workstations in the house run windows as the OS does not care whats at the back end. But as far as I know you can't run spamassassin right at the client. I could very well be wrong though, there may be ways to get it working on a workstation and even windows.

Though if email is important I'd strongly recommend a server solution like what I posted. It can even be in a VM on your workstation if you really don't have room/money for a separate server. The idea is that all the mail in the house will be centralized so it makes it easier to backup.

 

[imported_wired247]

gmail.

I get maybe 1 spam every month at most in the inbox, hundreds/thousands into my spam filter. I can deal with that, especially for free. (Free in cost, and also config-free)

And their filtering system is pretty nice too, to catch those pesky newsletters that you just can't seem to unsubscribe from, but don't show up as spam.

 

[Nothinman]

Can you use Spamassassin on a Windows based computer?

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/InstallingOnWindows

It's not exactly as simple as it is on Linux, but it's possible. But then again that's true of most things. =)

 

[corkyg]

Here's another interesting and related factoid. You have all probably heard the radio and TV commercials for Lifelock, Identity protection service. It does all it advertises - but after it went into effect - my daily spam count dropped from about 80-100 being trapped by Postini to about 1 or 2 a day only. Awesome difference! I don't know what they do, but I like it!