Over time, I've noticed that the quantity of spam getting through my Debian mail server has been increasing.
What steps are people taking to minimize the spam problem, especially if you are using Debian as both mail server and desktop? The wiki contains details about SpamAssassin[1] and examples of anti-spam configurations for various mailers such as Postfix[2]. Are there any new developments in anti-spam that are not covered there? Could anybody provide updates to those pages? What would professional mail server admins consider best practice today? One part of the problem I observe personally comes from having multiple email addresses. Those spammers who are not already on some blacklist that I use are able to deliver copies of the same spam to each of my addresses and so I often see 3 to 5 copies of a particular spamming in one day. Presumably I could limit these duplicates by disabling some of the email addresses. Are there any mechanisms in place that allow members of the free software community and other power users to identify spammings in progress and have them blacklisted more quickly? Many of the blacklist sites don't reveal how people can contribute to them. When I continue getting multiple copies of a particular spam throughout the day I feel this was a lost opportunity to blacklist somebody. How do people deal with MailChimp spam? Almost every other day I find some company I haven't had any dealings with for years has uploaded all their contacts, including myself, to MailChimp and started sending some newsletter. MailChimp seems to encourage this "softer" form of spamming as a legitimate business model and it happens so regularly that it is very tempting to blacklist the whole company. I've also observed there are a few companies in the travel industry who forcefully re-subscribe victims to their spam campaigns every time a new booking is made, even if the user already unsubscribed. Even without the newsletters, a single flight or hotel booking can generate well over 10 emails with advertising pushed under headings like "important information about your flight" or "reminder to leave a review". So far the only effective means I've found for dealing with this is using procmail to put them into a folder for travel, I never look there unless I deliberately need to find some previous message from one of these companies. Regards, Daniel 1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianSpamAssassin 2. https://wiki.debian.org/Postfix#anti-spam:_smtp_restrictions
