Bye Bye Junk Mail

I don’t know why it took me so long but I finally got around to properly installing junk (SpamAssassin) and virus (ClamAV) filters on my mail server. Although most of the junk was getting caught by Thunderbird, I was getting far too much junk mail and when I was accessing mail through the SquirrelMail web interface, which isn’t set up to filter junk, it was practically impossible to read mail.

I’d actually tried to set things up about a year ago, but at the time I was too busy to give it a proper try. But this time, I managed to find a wiki page with some instructions on setting SpamAssassin and ClamAV up using AMaVIS under a similar server setup (Gentoo, postfix, etc) and had things functioning within an hour or so. And most importantly, the setup is a huge success.

In the past two weeks, my server has quarantined roughly 4900 emails and 100 viruses. And instead of Thunderbird catching 80+ junk emails per day, it’s now only required to catch the six or seven that make it through. And that makes it easy for me to look for any false positives.

SpamAssassin assigns a score to every incoming email, and by default (at least under Gentoo) it quarantines anything with a score of 6.32 or greater. I found that this was a little loose and was still getting more junk emails than I should so I lowered the score to 5.26 which has given me my current results of an average of 6 junk emails per day. I been watching the incoming junk mails that get through and most of them have a score of 3.5 or less which I think is too low to change to and may end up classifying actual emails as junk. But I’ll likely play with the number slightly over time. In the meantime, I’m extremely pleased with the results. Cutting the junk down 90% is success in my mind.

1 comment »

1. By Travis Reeder 16 days later:

   
   
   Or just forward all your email to gmail, their spam filter works great. I currently have 29764 messages in my spam folder which only keeps the last 30 days. Also, you can setup FROM addresses in gmail too so you can send from any of your own domains. It's hot.