I won the war a while ago now.
I basically trash all emails not in my contact lists. Easy.
The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you certain the spam is actually coming from IP addresses controlled by those platforms? It's common for spammers to fake the SMTP headers.
I get plenty of spam from Gmail accounts with SPF and DKIM passing.
Plenty of dumps of stolen personal Gmail usernames+passwords, that anyone can feed into a bot that will use browser automation to sign into Gmail on those accounts and “hand write” some spam messages to send.
(If you haven’t realized, this is why Gmail has SMTP message origination disabled by default — these days requiring not only enabling it for your Gmail account, but also fiddling with app passwords to get it working. If it was enabled by default, the “spam from stolen credentials” problem would be so, so much worse. Whereas, at least with the webapp route, Google can block you if you look like a bot [i.e. if you’re doing an insufficiently good job at fooling them.])
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like rspamd much more (performance and redis) than SpamAssassin, and as you mentioned: - https://www.mail-tester.com - https://www.learndmarc.com - https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/ Are exellent tool's to check your "deliverability".
Suprised to not see https://mxtoolbox.com in this list too
Truetrue sorry, I forgot ;)
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a bonus to them that every time they block a smaller host there is a good chance that sender will consider a move to office365 or Google Workspace for their mail. The irony is that a substantial amount of the spam I receive comes from those platforms.
Are you certain the spam is actually coming from IP addresses controlled by those platforms? It's common for spammers to fake the SMTP headers.
I had spam bounces coming from Microsoft. Someone had convinced MS that they owned my domain and was apparently sending spam via an MS SMTP server (failing SPF was apparently not a problem for them), and any that bounced were being sent to my server: the real mail server for that domain. I reported the malicious org and explained what I had found out, but they obviously denied that it could possibly actually come from themselves and misunderstood what was happening (took me a bit to puzzle that out as well, those mystery emails showing up in my inbox). MS sending out spam isn't my problem, but I figured I'd be nice. Alas.
Few months later, they started bouncing my server's new IP address and that, too, wasn't their fault of course: "we're not seeing a block for your IP address so there cannot be bounces". Denying reality is super effective. The punchline was that they had blocked the new ISP's whole range rather than just my IP, so they weren't getting any hits when searching for my IP address. I found this out through some back-and-forth with a friendly sysadmin at the ISP, who was also banging their head against MS' wall...
These people must be so underpaid they're probably giving MS money for the privilege to work for such a correct business
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a bonus to them that every time they block a smaller host there is a good chance that sender will consider a move to office365 or Google Workspace for their mail. The irony is that a substantial amount of the spam I receive comes from those platforms.
Because of course, its an arms race.
> Because of course, its an arms race.
Somewhat out of context, but greylisting works as well as the day it came out.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
3-5 spams per week vs. 1 per month is a big difference
I got (if I'm reading this right) 5500 emails (junk+delivered) to my personal mail account from 12/01/2023 to 12/31/2023. So that's a minimum, since I don't see the ones that get flushed out before I even see them. 1 spam a month would be .018% of emails and 5 x 4 spams a month would be .364% of emails So I would have gotten about .346% more spam based on the number of emails. In reality, because I don't see all of t…
It's a 20x difference... My annoyance by spam is unrelated to the detection rate and is entirely related to the number of spam emails I see
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#87Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#88I've been using SpamAssassin for at least 15 years and it's sadly gotten less useful as the spam arms race has moved on. We regularly see people on here post about deliverability issues with Gmail/Outlook but the truth is that sender reputation is by far the biggest indicator of whether a message will be spam - these type of rules are just counting deckchairs on the titanic in comparison. And this plays into the stre…
> As an aside, not sure if OP is related to them but updown.io is a nice service and I appreciate the simple PAYG pricing! For what it's worth their mails seem to get through successfully to me too. Not related in any way except as an happy customer. They added a blog recently and this article caught my eye because of the nightmare that is mail delivery issue for everyone. I found it particularly ironic that you now…
Thank you
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because of course, its an arms race. Somewhat out of context, but greylisting works as well as the day it came out.
Probably should put "works" in quotes...
I've been using it for over a decade and I have only one domain I've had to make a rule in Postfix for because their admins don't know how to configure their racks of SMTP servers.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#90Spamassassin is doing it's job here, and doing a good job!
Most spammers and marketing/sales sleezoids never think they are doing anything wrong. They are totally empathy incapable. Or they know they are scum and don't care. Either way.
OP talks about adding "invisible text" and other such common spammer tactics to get around some of the rules. Zero self-awareness.
At no point did this person ever think "did I do something wrong?". No, it's that shitty Spamassassin!