Noticeable Spam Increase
Several technology news sources have noted in the past month that the amount of spam being sent out has increased dramatically. On my mail server, I didn’t notice any changes until last week when I saw a huge jump in the number of spam emails – from 4 or 5 emails getting through my filter to an average of 20 per day. The emails are actually all the same content and with only slight variations in the subject line and different sender name/email. So I’ve once again dropped my filter score in the hopes of catching more of this crap. It’s a bit of a pain as dropping the score in simply a change to a configuration file but I need to scan my email inbox to ensure that dropping the score won’t trap any emails I actually want to receive.
Also, I’ve now set up my server to automatically remove old emails caught by the spam filter. I’ve set virus emails to be removed after 7 days and other emails to be removed after 14 days. That way any emails which are caught unnecessarily can be recovered. I set up a daily cron job which runs the following script:
#!/bin/sh cd /var/amavis/quarantine/ find -atime +14 | grep "badh-" | xargs rm find -atime +14 | grep "spam-" | xargs rm find -atime +7 | grep "virus-" | xargs rm
Now I just need to find a web-based application that will allow me to preview the emails caught by the spam filter and allow them through if necessary. The Astaro firewall product has a similar feature and it was invaluable.
Wed, 22 Nov 2006 04:20 Posted in Technology
