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On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, NW wrote:
Thanks, I must try to get her to change to TB or better still go to Linux.
I think that at this point, you have to accept that she's getting SPAM, so now you need to devise a strategy to deal with it.
If there are no incoming spam filters, then you need to filter it at your collection point - either the webmail system you use or the MUA - be that Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever.
If you have control over the mail server then that's the place I'd start. Implement some basic anti-spam measures - NoListing is cheap and quick, but you need control of your DNS and a spare IP address to use.
After that, it's a toss-up as to which strategy you use - RBL systems, Greylisting, filters (spam assassin, etc.)
If you don't have control of the mail server (and by that I really mean root access), then you're limited to filtering, but you also have to accept that you need to copy all the email off the remote server to your local systems, then filter out the spam as you go.
The strategy I use for myself & my customers involves NoListing up-front, then a single RBL lookup, then Greylisting, then filtering through spam assassin then delivery. I leave SA to last as it's computationally expensive - however it's currently about 80% effective in what gets through the rest. I still get about a dozen messages a day through those filters and 8-10 of those are flagged by SA, (and thus get automatically filtered), the rest get to my in-box, and I can live with that.
I use sendmail - not to everyones liking, but I've been using it since I first had access to the world at large via a 9600 baud PSS connection nearly 20 years ago... In those days you could use it to get a root shell on the remote server, but people sort of trusted you back then...
And thinking about it now - the NoList/RBL/Greylist is very effective right now. It's still cutting down a major portion of the incoming SPAM, leaving a mere trickle for SA to deal with.
I'd lost confidence in RBL lists a while back as I was getting too many false positives, but thank to a message from SimonW a while back did some investigations and started to use ix.dnsbl.manitu.net - I've only have one complaint from a customer about it, but as it's an auto-remove system, and entries are only valid for 12 hours anyway, they whinged at their ISP and re-sent their email successfully a few hours later...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html