On 2010-08-24 22:37, Duaine Hechler wrote:
Because I have a business and don't want to take the chance of deleting something I may want to get, I have been using the IP address as well as a few keywords to build my own spam control - so far blocking about 99%.
I've tried googling many ways and not getting anything I'm looking for.
However, is there any tell tale signs in the email headers to look for ?
Any website that tells how to block spam using info from the headers ?
I understand from other posts that you are using pop3 to get your email, and using your own filters to delete email on your ISP server. That you don't want to use spamassassin because you simply do not want to download the email. That contradicts what you said in your original post, ie, that you “don't want to take the chance of deleting something I may want to get”, because you are running that chance by your current method. Attempting to keep ahead of spam that way is futile: they are many, you are one; and they are good at what they do (ie, spamming). You have to use services from people that make their job to do just that, fight them, and they are good at it, too. Well, You have two possibilities. One: use spamassassin - yes, I insist. Download all the email (yes, download it), then filter it with SA, moving (yes, not deleting) to a different folder, and keep good email in the "good" folder. Why? Because the best known method to classify spam email is to analyze each email completely, both headers and body. SA does this via what they call Bayesian filtering. First they analyze the headers the "classical way", then all of it⁽¹⁾. The people in the best position to do this are your ISP, but they don't. So... alternative "a", download it and let SA examine it. Alternative "b", let some other, nice, ISP, do the job for you. Ie, let gmail (for example) download your email, do the filtering for you (after you train it), and then you download it. Notice two things. Gmail will "machine read" your email. They do this, they say, to put appropriate comercials on the side bar. The other is that gmail will not delete your spam. It will be left there for a month before they delete it; you have to review it (via web interface) and reclassify what is spam and not before deleting the real spam. Note ⁽¹⁾: It is possible to analyze some headers and then dump email, using spamassassin, before it is downloaded. It needs that you run your own "real" smtp server, so that you can really reject email. I haven't read of this while fetching from pop3/imap and SA. If you do it badly and bounce emails, you can be blacklisted as spammer yourself. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" GM (Elessar))