Dealing with Spam

I get too much spam. Specifically, my home account gets close to 500 spam messages a day. Normally, I rely on SpamSieve on my Macbook Pro to filter all that noise, and it does a pretty good job (on average 1 spam a day makes it through). But now that I’m also getting my e-mail on my iPhone, SpamSieve is no longer meeting my needs. Since SpamSieve depends on my Mac to be running, and often the Mac is: off, alseep, or just not on the Internet; all that e-mail has been showing up unfiltered on the iPhone.

So this weekend I’ve moved my spam handling back to the server-side. The first step was to starting removing as many bogus connections as possible. To do that I implemented fake MX records, and SMTP transaction delays. Next I started greylisting (using milter-greylist) all incoming e-mail. You can read more about these spam fighting techniques here

The results over the last 24 hours: approx. 10 spam messages were logged in SpamSieve

I plan to start using SpamAssassin again to handle those few messages that still make it through the new server-side spam tools, but life is now much better on the iPhone.