Re: pdf spams

On 08/13, Brian Burton wrote:
> deliberately open a pdf to see it.  Do people really open these things??

The same can be said for all spams.  They only need to fool a small
percentage of people to be profitable.

> to the special test though.  SP definitely learns to catch them after
> an initial training period.

I hadn't looked, but yes, SP is definitely catching pdf spams.  
For those having problems with them:  Keep retraining spamprobe.  

Keep your folders separated something like:

* nonspam
* missed spam (that showed up in your nonspam folder)
* spam

Every day check your nonspam folder for spam and move it all into your
missed spam folder, then run a script to retrain spamprobe on those two
folders.  I run my script... more than once a day, and it's effortless.

> Yeah, greylisting won't stop a spammer with a fully compliant mail
> server but it works nonetheless.  The number of spam emails processed
> by spamprobe dropped by over 90% here when I added postgrey to my
> stack.  That's pretty astounding.  It's pretty annoying when you

Yup.

> register on a new web site though.  Some mail servers can take a LONG
> time to retry after getting the "unavailable" code.

Definitely.  I've started seeing websites telling you what address your
registration verification email will be coming from.  I do think that is
the answer, along with whitelisting.  I don't know if postgrey can do that
on a user level yet, but it shouldn't be hard.  "Whitelist this address
once, then remove it from the whitelist and add it to the greylist db."

-- 
"I'd rather be happy than right any day."
- Slartiblartfast, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
http://www.ChaosReigns.com

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