I don't like spam

• First, i use procmail to filter out the most obvious spams. Any mail not containing my address in the To: or the Cc: header goes to the spam folder. As this rule would match to many mailing lists as well I have a rule for every mailing list above. So my .procmailrc looks like this:

  :0
  * ^To: .*[email protected]
  backhand-users
  
  :0
  * ^List-ID: <freebsd-isp.FreeBSD.ORG>
  freebsd-isp
  
  :0
  * ^X-Loop.*[email protected]
  deb.security
  
  :0:
  * ! ^From: Charlie Root <root@firewall>
  * ! ^(To|Cc):.*ims\.at
  * ! ^(To|Cc):.*domig\.net
  * ! ^(To|Cc):.*linuxpunk\.org
  * ! ^(To|Cc):.*lzk.ac.at
  spam
  

• There still are many mails passing this check. So I did a search on the web, to discover Vipul's Razor. It's a small filter that generates hashes from emails that is compared to a database on the net. If the hash matches it's a spam, and procmail can handle it as such:

  :0 Wc
  | razor-check
  :0 Wa
  spam
  

  Debian users: download vipuls razor v2 here.

• As Vipul's Razor depends on people who submit mails, i've set up a trollbox. Any mail sent to that address is submitted to Vipul's database.
  I have created .deb's from Vipul's Razor. Note that there exist debian packages for the "old" razor system, these are for the much more advanced razor v2. See the download page.

• Server side protection: I use the distributed sender boycott list to keep spam traffic down. DSBL has some nice tools to test mail servers for open relay, socks proxies and insecure mail cgi scripts. Nice to use in combination with spamtraps; every single IP address in the headers of an email is tested, and if positive, submitted to the blacklist. Debian packages are available ;o)