

SPAMASSASSIN THUNDERBIRD FREE
I've just moved our corporate mail over to gmail, initially the free 'standard edition' of the google hosted apps. Greylisting has occasionally been inconvenient, but between it and the other measures, I'm down to maybe 5 per day - and a lot of them fit the same pattern, so if I wrote my own quickie procmail filters for them I could cut that at least in half if desired. I don't use any RBLs because there was too much of a tendency to blacklist larger blocks to try to force ISPs to remove spammers by causing collateral damage, and I couldn't have legitimate email discarded. Greylisting was the one that really cut it down. I have a combination of personal procmail filters I built up in the pre-spamassassin era, spamassassin itself, and greylisting. With gmail, I have received few spam messages in the first place, and zero false positives.Īs for my personal mail, I used to get over 60,000 spam messages per month, raw. Also, I've had a number of false positives, and I wasn't really checking that much. A lot slip through, and the address is unpublished (by me, at least). It's very easy for me to ID spam in my yahoo box because I use it only to receive yahoo group emails. ( Postgrey kicks ass as a greylisting implementation for Postfix.)Īmusing side note: WCNet used to stand for "Woody County FreeNet" but the notion of a FreeNet is pretty old, and the service has grown to cover much of northern Ohio and southern Michigan. Even with greylisting, which helps a lot, we're still dealing with a lot of spam. We have roughly 15,000 users and get a lot of spam. If Google offered small business mail the way Yahoo does, there'd be some serious competition in the market and it'd make a lot of people's lives much easier.įor the last 10 years I've helped run the various services for WCNet, a community ISP in northwestern Ohio. This all makes me wonder if it's worth it for smaller organizations to bother running their own mail servers anymore. Gmail is usable at home, on the road, and at conferences with unsecured networks. I'm spending less time dealing with the crap that used to end up in my inbox. That, combined with the fact that you even get secure (meaning encrypted) POP access and the ability to use Gmail as your SMTP relay (once you setup SMTP AUTH in your mail client) tells me one thing: The folks behind Gmail are trying to give everyone the sort of power and flexibility that used to come only with running your own mail server. Gmail makes it easy to turn on POP access to your inbox and even gives you smart choices about what to do with the Gmail copies once you've popped your mail:

The only logical thing to do was take advantage of Gmail's spam filtering and secure POP access. I still end up with 75 – 100 spams a day in Thunderbiard, when Gmail is knocking out most of 'em. Even after training Thunderbird's spam filter for months, the combination of SpamAssassin and Thunderbird are far less effective. And just the other day I realized how much less effective it is. And I suspect they're both using virtually all the same techniques anyway.īut all along, I've been popping my personal email into Thurderbird from my own mail server, which runs a combination of spam-fighting stuff. In any given day, I get maybe 15 – 25 spam messages on both systems. Though I don't regularly use Yahoo! Mail, we do have the benefit of SpamGuard on our corporate mail servers so I've developed a subjective notion of how much spam sneaks through both systems. Based on my experience, the spam detection and filtering in Gmail is as good as Yahoo's SpamGuard. Even the most basic spam, the stuff that SpamAssassin would score in the 20+ range, would make it through.īut today things are quite a bit different. It's been fun to watch the evolution of Gmail's spam filtering.
