Istvan Kope wrote:
I your opinion, when the email functionality is critical, does it worth to use blacklists or not? I had quite a few situations when critical mails didn't arrive because of this blacklists, then I said is better to receive more spam, than miss critical mails.Some experts say that SpamAssassin is a bullsh*t. Is that correct??Which blacklists are 100% accurate(they never block a non-spam), even if they are weaker than others?? I see that the latest realease of qmail-toaster is using only zen.spamhaus and according to Jake is blocking dynamic IP-s. Why did you decide to use this blacklist in the latest release??
Sorry, I missed these. Been traveling a bit lately.Are blacklists worth it? That's all a matter of opinion. The people over on the Spamassassin mailing list disagree with blocking messages on the SMTP level like QMT does with the blacklists; I've personally found that using 1 or maybe 2 works for me and blocks probably around 70%-90% of my spam. And remember: everyone has an opinion and no one has to be qualified to give it, and that there are 3 sides to every story - yours, mine, and the truth. I personally like Spamassasin. I added some additional rules from Rules Emporium, enabled URIDNSBL, train my Bayes, and wrote a few custom rules and it has worked for me decently. It's not perfect, but it does okay. URIDNSBL was a great addition, and training your Bayes is also a very good thing to do. I even purchased a new domain that I use to go find spam (post on the newsgroups, embed it in white text in a web page, etc.) and the spam will start rolling in. I then feed all the messages to this account to sa-learn nightly, as well as feed good emails to it as well (such as a couple mailing lists). I probably still get a total (for all users and domains on 1 server, in the area of 300 users who do silly things like enter their email addresses on cards at the store for mailers, or enter their email address when they want to win free stuff online) of about 30-50 spam messages a day that actually get through. I don't think there's an easy way to see how many are blocked at the SMTP level, but by doing some math (and using cat/grep/wc) I can say that roughly 19,200 messages a day are block on the SMTP level by the blacklists. And here's my spam stats:
Email: 232678 Autolearn: 63457 AvgScore: 11.39 AvgScanTime: 1.77 sec Spam: 110621 Autolearn: 39859 AvgScore: 24.74 AvgScanTime: 1.75 sec Ham: 122057 Autolearn: 23598 AvgScore: -0.71 AvgScanTime: 1.79 secSo you can see that about half the emails that get past the blacklist are marked as spam in some way/shape/form. I do get false positives, but have weeded most of those out by utilizing a whitelist system.
And to your last question, why spamhaus was used in the last release if it's blocking dynamic IP addresses.... QMT has no control over what the various other people do. Spamhaus just changed their policy the last week or so ago. The QMT project is just an easy way for you to get QMail installed, and you get what a couple of us think are the best settings as default. If you read any of the messages or the wiki, you'll see that the first thing we tell everyone is to configure it for your needs. Spamhaus was great up until a week or so ago. So it was used. It's also no great secret that some disagreements are aired on the development list. Those who have input/develop/help with the project do not always agree with what options/changes are made as well. Once again, we all have our own opinions, and you (by downloading the packages) are getting in what our opinion is a usable mail system. It works for the majority of the people. Does it work for me? No - I've customized mine just about every way you can think of. That does work for me. If emails are ABSOLUTELY critical (and they usually are these days), I'd suggest not blocking any on the SMTP level and concentrating your efforts on scoring the messages. If you're using the spambox option, set the delete flag to a very high number. That way if a message does get scored as spam, it gets put in the Spam folder instead of just deleted and the user can still get the email (and you can tweak the system to keep if from happening again).
Hopefully that answered your questions.
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