[Boulder.pm] meeting/topic?

[Walter Pienciak]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, lz wrote:

> Hello Walter,
>
> Have you checked out MailWasher. Been using it a week now
> and am impressed. It dl's just headers then you pick the
> ones to blacklist and send a 'bounce' saying 'unknown user'
> all from the isp server. The bounce should get one off spam
> lists, little by little, as they are cleaned.
>
> I've noticed a reduction from 20-25% down to about 5%.
>
> Lots more to it. Info at:
> http://www.mailwasher.net/
>
> Only for windoz, if that's not for you then maybe you can
> get some ideas from it for your pearl program. (to stay on
> topic)
>
> zya

Nope, I'm a Unix fella these days.  Plus, I'm trying to solve
the problem not just for my own inbox(es) but for other users
also.   Bouncing isn't a bad response at all, but when I'm
transitioning among spam detectors, I like to eyeball it for
a while to make sure it's detecting ONLY spam.  But when I
have bouncing enabled, I do see the same reduction in incoming
spam that you report.

One issue there is that if you have admin responsibilities,
and someone forwards a spam to complain (either they're a user
and they received it, or someone thinks one of your users sent
it), it's not always pleasing to the sender to have the thing
bounce back to them with a "Bad Spammer!  Bad!  Bad!" message.
Whitelists can *help*, but I'm thinking the Bayesian approach
is going to be the winner there.

Walter

p.s. -- It's perl or Perl or PERL, but not pearl.