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Building a Healthier, Low Spam Internet

Members of the ISP-Tech list take an early morning coffee break to complain about the proliferation of spam on the Internet. It's time to wake up, smell the coffee, and install any one of several suggested spam filters.

[March 28, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in March, GI asked,

"What spam filtering services is everyone using? I need to cut down on spam, and I'm wondering what my options are."

A number of respondents shared their favorite solutions:

[EK enthused] "ORDB is a good one! It's got many configurations for many mail servers. I'm using this, along with an access list using sendmail for Linux. ORDB catches a lot, but by keeping an eye on the mail log, finding out who's bombing the mail server and setting it to reject their mail, I've captured over 7000 messages already since 8 this morning."

[JC noted] "We put in Lyris MailShield about a year ago. It's cut out about 90 percent of spam."

[LC added] "IMGate also cuts about 90 percent of spam, and for free."

Others worried about the negative effects of overenthusiastic spam blocking:

[PM observed] "Dealing with spam is such a double edged sword, it isn't funny. While most of us would love to get rid of as much of it as possible, there is still the chance that you are going to block an important e-mail and catch heck for it. Running programs on individual mail accounts is one thing, but it gets a lot harder when you are dealing with all of your customers. We have gone to extremes in the past, and while the amount of spam that it cut down was nice, the amount of legitimate mail that it rejected was also pretty high, and we had to back out of the changes. You can combat spam all you want, but once it start costing you a serious amount of customers, the business side of the house starts getting really anxious and you have to remove the blocks."

[SE recalled] "We had to stop using ORBZ due to the high volume of legitimate e-mail that kept being blocked. It wasn't worth my time to keep explaining to admins how to fix open relays."

[ed. note: ORBZ is at the moment being replaced. See Related articles for details.]

RF suggested that, with the right setup, there's no reason for concern:

"I have a qmail/rblsmtpd mail relay running all messages through both ORDB and ORBZ, serving a corporation with roughly 300 mailboxes. In an average day it blocks 2,000 messages, without a single complaint of a legitimate message being blocked so far."

—End