Hello, I am asking if anyone is familiar with a hosting company that carries an effective anti-spam tool along with their services. I think this is the best place to ask since alot of you perl monks (besides being geniuses) deal with various servers. I could try and write it, but I don't have any perl experience with smtp or pop3 servers yet. I am slightly familiar with spam-cop and simmilar tools, but are they effective? Does anyone know anything that really works...? Thank you soo much, in advance.

JayBee

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Re: Spam Blocking servers
by b10m (Vicar) on Feb 19, 2004 at 07:04 UTC

    Wow, I can even push this to "slightly on-topic", for you should check out SpamAssassin, which is written in *tada* Perl!

    Seriously now, I have seen some great results with SpamAssassin coupled with some RBLs (like spamcop, SPEWS etc.).

    --
    b10m

    All code is usually tested, but rarely trusted.
[reply]
      Sticking with the topic, check out qpsmtpd, too.

      I've heard about some slick spam blocking that can happen when this is combined with SpamAssassin.
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      I use SpamCop to process my email before it gets to my machine. My email account is set up to forward to SpamCop, and then I POP from them.
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Re: Spam Blocking servers
by seattlejohn (Deacon) on Feb 19, 2004 at 08:04 UTC
    Ditto what b10m says.

    Don't try to write it yourself. Keeping up with the spammers is a full-time job.

    The hot technology right now seems to be Bayesian filtering, which looks at the types of words that appear in an individual's legitimate mail versus the spam he receives to determine the likelihood something is spam. I personally use SpamAssassin, which uses Bayesian filtering in addition to a variety of heuristics. SA is available as part of the hosting capabilities provided by pair Networks -- which, incidentally, also hosts PerlMonks. Once I trained it, SA seemed to capture more than 90 percent of spam, with zero false positives. The results could probably be better, but I would rather wade through a few unmarked spam than risk false positives.

    I've also heard some folks rave about SpamBayes, which is available as a server-side filter or Outlook (if you must ;-) plug-in. I have no personal experience with it.

            $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';

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Re: Spam Blocking servers
by CloneArmyCommander (Friar) on Feb 20, 2004 at 17:29 UTC
    EAnthology has a cool spam blocking tool that learns. You can set it up to work with Outlook Express, and it places a small image with two slots like a mail box and you drag and drop e-mails into either the block or accept box and after a while it learns what's good and what isn't. At first it seems kindof repetive, but after a few weeks it gets the idea and you can live spam free :).
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