reporting spam? (was RE: 5 dollar emails)

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> What happens with all the spam this group gets?  Does anyone bother
    >> forwarding it to spam-fighting agencies? [...]

    gh> SpamAssassin (one of the few P*rl programs I liked enough to
    gh> install) does the spam filtering for me and it does an amazingly
    gh> good job at it.  The spam (and a few false positives) getted tagged
    gh> and put in my caughtspam folder, which I review regularly.

It's those "few false positives" that mean you have to keep reviewing your
caughtspam folder.  If you had a few false negatives you'd be better off.  I
will plug Jason Mastaler's TMDA project here:

   http://software.libertine.org/tmda/

It's model of how spam should be treated is different than tools like
SpamAssassin and SpamBouncer.  It places the onus on the sender to confirm
that their mail is valid.  This works well against most spammers because
they generally don't reply to email.

TMDA has a very active community of developers and users.  It works with
several MTAs: sendmail, postfix, exim and qmail.  And it's written in Python
to boot.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com - http://www.mojam.com/)