Flashes of Panic

Another NYT article in today’s “Circuits” section is called “Stand and Fight: An Arsenal for Spam Victims.” Unfortunately, it deals mostly with commercial anti-spam tools, and I’ve mentioned my problems with these before. It mentions challenge-response matter-of-factly, as though there are no drawbacks to suggesting to random people trying to get in touch with you that they might be spammers. Still, they’re trying.

I’m trying, too. A preponderance of drug spam in my inbox (“Spam giving you a headache? We’ve got the pill for you!”) finally spurred me to tweak our SpamAssassin rules, and it has worked well. I’m keeping a close eye on the losers, to see what’s worked; an autopsy, if you will. Working backwards, a few rulesets added from the SpamAssassin Custom Rules Emporium (thanks to Jeremy, who keeps posting useful stuff, for the link) have been helpful, but mostly they’ve served to inflate the scores of stuff that might have been caught anyway. Much more useful were the small list of tweaks Kasia posted.

Steve F. of the incredible company Panic Software has a pretty good post detailing the reasoning behind his SA rules adjustment.