Spam filtering progressing

Spam has increased dramatically lately, and the old filtering on agora is even less capable of coping. There is help on the way though: I’m making good progress on a new front end filter that will not only be running current spam and virus filtering, but it will eventually allow better user control over how it works. It currently does:

  • white/blacklist processing
  • greylisting (if mail hasn’t been seen before from this sender, issue a temporary error once and see if they retry it — real servers will, spammers often won’t — this is cutting the load in half on agora even now)
  • spf (checks to see if the mail is coming from a server authorized to send mail from the sender’s stated domain, for those domains that have listed authorized servers, this cuts down on forged mail)
  • checking with a current version of spamassassin to see if it’s spam or not

Still to do:

  • quarantine suspected spam
  • check with a virus checker (clamav) and quarantine suspected virii
  • provide user access to white/blacklists, quarantine and enable/disable various filter options

I should have the spam and virus checking working this week, and hope to have the user interface done next week.

If anyone gets a reasonable amount of mail (at least several daily) and wants to be a guinea pig, let me know (preferably if you have your own domain, but there’s some value in forwarding through it as well…)!

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