Or, how to block a few million spams per day without breaking a sweat.
© 2005 by Jef Poskanzer.
In November 2004, Microsoft's second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some
headlines
by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day.
At the time, I was dealing with a little spam problem of my
own - I was getting around a million spams per day.
I found it a little comforting that my problem wasn't quite as bad as Bill's.
However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer
corrected himself,
saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million
per year.
This means I was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates.
Nevertheless, after filtering we both get about the same amount: around
ten spams per day in our inboxes.
Ballmer says that Microsoft has an entire department dedicated to protecting
their mailboxes from spam.
At ACME Labs there's just one guy, one server, and a T1 line.
And yet my filters are a hundred times as effective as Microsoft's.
How do I do it?
These pages will show you how, and help you deploy similar filters
on your own system.
What am I trying to do here?
For those who like to read the end of a novel first, here are some
overall stats showing how the filters are performing.
This is all based on a Unix system running sendmail.
If you're not using Unix, or you're using a different Unix-based
mail system, most of the specific advice here will not help you.
You may still find some value in the general ideas.
Introduction
Goals
Results
Environment
>>> [Background] >>> |