Occasionally, the spam in my inbox turns out to be downright hilarious. Today, such a spam arrived.
Following is the filler text from a spam trying to sell me renter’s insurance. It is presumably intended to make spam filters think the message is legit — it barely fooled SpamAssassin, but not Thunderbird. It’s clearly generated by a random prose generator with a singularly limited (and odd) vocabulary.
The battle against spam is a never-ending arms race, and in the last week or two the spammers overcame my defenses. Thus, I have had to disable comments for the time being while I debug the current defense systems and potentially implement new ones.
I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I really don’t want our comments filled with nasty links, and we currently don’t have a moderation system (it’s on the todo list, honest!).
Last night, I was updating some packages on our server. Among these was SpamAssassin. The update shut down the spam filter daemon, and I did not notice this. Until this morning, when my inbox was full of spam.
Spam filter is off for one night (~12 hours), and I get 71 spams. As opposed to the normal 2 or 3 per day that actually make it to my inbox. Kudos to the SpamAssassin developers for such an excellent product.
This is just to say that I like SpamAssassin. I’ve been running it on my mail server for the last few months, and found it to be rather robust. I’ve never received a false positive, and my wife has received only a few. It also blocks the vast majority of spam - a handful of messages trickle past it into my inbox.
I’ve found that I’m able to trust it enough that anything to my address with a spam score of 10 or higher automatically hits the bit bucket (5 or higher gets stashed in my spam folder).