Sendmail: How does one blacklist annoying spammers?

jdow jdow at earthlink.net
Sun Jun 27 22:26:13 UTC 2010


From: "Daniel B. Thurman" <dant at cdkkt.com>
Sent: Friday, 2010/June/25 14:46


> 
> I thought it was sufficient to look into the headers
> of the offending email spammmers and add these respective
> IP address and/or host names to the /etc/mail/access file,
> but I am beginning to suspect that these headers could be
> easily spoofed with bogus entries, right?
> 
> I am really getting tired of adding in entries into the access
> file, and writing email filters (in thunderbird) for patterns
> dumping spammers into the trash - and yet - I am still forced
> to review the trash for entries that should not have been trashed.  
> Seems like a real chore and a losing proposition...
> 
> What do admins of sendmail use, besides spamassasin?

Look up "SpamAssassin".

If you are somewhat adept at tweaking tools like sendmail look up the
term "greylisting" and see if that process fits into your requirements.

Personally I prefer to use SpamAssassin with a simple procmail setup
rather than one of the milters. Their default installations seem to
be heavy handed and seem to obscure the SpamAssassin scoring.

If you do select SpamAssassin you might find some interesting rule
sets at the SpamAssassin RulesEmporium. (Although those have not
been updated much in the recent couple years. They just seem to work
well enough in most cases.) Also visit the SpamAssassin wiki and check
out the plugins.

{^_^}   (I almost used top posting and not capitalizing letters just
        to annoy some twits on this list. Then I decided to be polite
        for a change. Of course, I did leave you a lot of homework to
        do. Your needs are not my needs or anyone else's needs. Your
        spam is not my spam, necessarily. So some hand tailoring will
        be required of ANY solution.)


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