Spam-Be-Gone
Mar. 18th, 2005 12:14 pmUpdated SpamAssassin on Skotos' main mail server yesterday. It was a pain and a half, but it's now done, and, miraculously ... my spam is almost gone again.
I use a two step method, spamassassin+Thunderbird, and that tends to do the job for a little bit, but then the spammers start putting even more random text in, and I start wasting even more time each day weeding out spam, and eventually that time wasted gets great enough that I decided I should just waste the time updating spamassassin (or searching for new plugins for Thunderbird).
Unfortunately, updating spamassassin is never easy. We use a stable-version of Debian Linux, and that means that software updates gets introduced--well, I'd say once in a blue moon, but it's actually less frequent than that. The version of spamassassin incorporated into stable Linux is from about 1983, I think. That works very, very poorly in conjunction with the constantly evolving world of spam.
So I have to do an install by hand, and it gets to be a mess because of the packages previously installed in different places, and I tear out hair and curse. I finally did something intelligent (I think) this time by totally removing the original debian spamassassin packages. I think that'll make it easier to install in the future.
So, I'm good on spam ... for another week or two, and then things will slowly start to get worse again.
I use a two step method, spamassassin+Thunderbird, and that tends to do the job for a little bit, but then the spammers start putting even more random text in, and I start wasting even more time each day weeding out spam, and eventually that time wasted gets great enough that I decided I should just waste the time updating spamassassin (or searching for new plugins for Thunderbird).
Unfortunately, updating spamassassin is never easy. We use a stable-version of Debian Linux, and that means that software updates gets introduced--well, I'd say once in a blue moon, but it's actually less frequent than that. The version of spamassassin incorporated into stable Linux is from about 1983, I think. That works very, very poorly in conjunction with the constantly evolving world of spam.
So I have to do an install by hand, and it gets to be a mess because of the packages previously installed in different places, and I tear out hair and curse. I finally did something intelligent (I think) this time by totally removing the original debian spamassassin packages. I think that'll make it easier to install in the future.
So, I'm good on spam ... for another week or two, and then things will slowly start to get worse again.