June 27, 2004
Comments, spam, viri
One thing I did notice while I was away - the sheer bulk of crap flooding my inbox and my blog on a daily basis. At the beginning of last week, I had to take drastic action and remove the Movable Type comment script temporarily, as the spam in this blog was threatening to overwhelm me.
I had my laptop with me in Corfu, primarily so that I could download photos from my camera (I have a few MMC cards, but not nearly enough for the number of photos I planned to take). It also allowed me to keep an eye on my mail. At one point, I was cut off all weekend when Vodafone Greece broke GPRS in Corfu, and by Monday morning this is what I was faced with:
Over 1300 messages. On a weekend, when things are slow. A quick check revealed more than 1000 of them were spam, virus or mailserver error messages. And this is after I filtered the worst out on the server.
On Friday, spamassassin and clamav were installed by a friendly sysadmin. Things are a lot quieter now.
Posted by savs at June 27, 2004 7:11 PMClamAV certainly has seemed to help my mail flood. I still get the occasional mail trickle into my inbox but, without any bayesian filtering at all:
The stats from yesterday, in run time order:
postfix rules (RBLs, strict rfc compliance, some others): 709 mails caught
clamav: 1640
spamassassin: 178
the majority of the RBL matches are from the sbl-xbl list, and they don't even hit the system.
I think I saw approx 5 spams make it through yesterday.
Posted by: Thom at June 30, 2004 6:32 PM