April 4, 2004
Taking the trash out
I'd had enough. I finally snapped. After a week where my intake of spam and virus mail had hit over 300 a day, I decided it was time to act. Even with whitelists, I found I was still scanning the trash for false positives. I quickly came to the conclusion I should just dump mail with attachments containing .pif, .cmd, .bat, etc.
Following on from Sylvain's comment on my whitelists post, I put in place a pretty harsh system-wide filter to block the worst of the crap. I also took the opportunity to drop into place a block for spammers who harvested my email address from newsgroups.
The only thing I'm undecided on is whether I should send automated replies to junked email or not. I could do with figuring out if there's a standard subject line prefix, so others can junk the automated messages in turn.
You can keep an eye on how the filter is doing, and compare with my previous virus blocking attempts. Wonder how quickly the junk filter will overtake sobig?
It should be a quiet week next week. Hopefully email will become usable again.
Posted by savs at April 4, 2004 1:53 AM