Mail Processing Tools

Posted by John Minnihan - 21/03/05 at 09:03:17 am

I get lots of email every day, as does almost anyone who has had an online identity for ten + years. Much of this is spam (you’re shocked, I know)

I have to deal with it in some way. The beauty of my approach is that I deal with the majority of the spam w/o ever seeing it.

I have run my own email server for many years now. I began using sendmail & have stuck with it, mostly because I know it well and have it tuned to my needs. I have explored both postfix and qmail, and found neither to quite match my needs in terms of a plugin replacement for sendmail. That’s mostly due to two factors:

  • I use a combination of spamassassin, mailscanner & mailwatch for spam processing
  • I relay mail for a select group of additional domains

My spam processing is actually quite cool. I have my sendmail startup wrapped inside my MailScanner startup, so any time sendmail is started, MailScanner gets fired up too. MailScanner uses spamassassiin, which I have tuned over the years with the bayes scheme. I then process everything through mailwatch, which does a great job of categorizing the spam (all mail really), and presenting it to me in nice tables. The graphing is awesome, and while initially it was simply very cool, I have now grown to depend upon it for trending data.

Consider this:

My mail is now consistently 83% – 88% spam. This is both amazing and valuable data: for each piece of spam that these tools process for me, I save approximately 15 seconds of time that it would take to at a minimum, select the mesage and click ‘Delete’ . On average, I receive about 800 messages per day. The simple math says this saves me 176 minutes per day, or just less than 3 hours. All of this data, including the creation of the statistics, is created for me by these tools.

3 hours. Think about that a bit. 3 hours. I love these tools.

Popularity: 1% [?]

  • I've been monitoring spam (thanks to the fantastic Mailwatch application) and see that it is now closer to 64% rather than the earlier 83-88%. The overall amount of mail processed is dropping as well, so I conclude that my filtering and active blocking of known spammers is working. I also run portsentry on my systems, and this actively blocks (via tcpwrappers) attempts to scan my system(s) for open ports. The old SYN/Normal scan? I catch this every time, and I am convinced that it has decreased the amount of spam I receive.

    These new numbers reflect messages processed, and so the stuff that is blocked prior to Spamassassin isn't counted. So more real messages are being processed, as a percentage of total messages, now. And That is a Good Thing (tm).
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