SEO

I've decided to bite the spam bullet and set up a whitelist on my mail
server. So only people I have personally added to the whitelist will be
able to send me mail, and all spam will be rejected. I have a couple of
questions about this:

1. I currently use exim4 as my MTA - it looks possible to configure a
whitelist using exim4 alone. Is there any advantage to installing and
configuring spamassassin as well? Many people swear by spamassassin,
but it looks to me as if its advantages are in normal environments (ie.
where there is no whitelist set up). Any tips on using exim4 for
whitelisting greatly appreciated.

2. Are whitelists fooled by spam which fakes its source? I mean,
there's really no point doing this, and going through all the hassle of
placating those people I forget to put on the whitelist, if I'm *still*
going to get spam. I have no experience of running a whitelist and
wondered if anyone here knew how effective they were. Is spamassassin
less easily fooled than exim4?

CC

magnate <chrisc@dbass.demon.co.uk>:
> I've decided to bite the spam bullet and set up a whitelist on my mail
> server. So only people I have personally added to the whitelist will be
> able to send me mail, and all spam will be rejected. I have a couple of
..........................^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^

No, *everything* from non-whitelisted senders will be rejected. Job
offers, requests for help, secondary accounts (yahoo, hotmail) of
whitelisted senders, etc.

> questions about this:
>
> 1. I currently use exim4 as my MTA - it looks possible to configure a
> whitelist using exim4 alone. Is there any advantage to installing and
> configuring spamassassin as well? Many people swear by spamassassin,

Not much unless your whitelisted senders send you spam, or you get
spam that forges their address as the From: address. I get lots of
spam that says it was sent by me.

> 2. Are whitelists fooled by spam which fakes its source? I mean,

Obviously. However, depending on what you use to implement
whitelisting, it could be simple or complex. For instance, mine goes
so far as to look at originating IP in Received: lines. If that
doesn't match where that whitelisted sender usually sends from,
/dev/null (Spamfile, actually).

> wondered if anyone here knew how effective they were. Is spamassassin
> less easily fooled than exim4?

?!?

Spamassassin is trainable, has many, many tests which it uses to
decide, and lets you decide what score defines good mail and what
UCE/UBE.

Exim has filters, yes? What else? I imagine Exim can be set up to
use spamassassin to do the tests. However, that's not exactly
whitelisting.

A much better place to ask these questions is comp.mail.misc.

[Followups set: comp.mail.misc]


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