Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.....

I finally did something about the growing amount of spam in my in-box. It was brought home to me when I got back from Maelstrom to have to delete 100 or so messages through my spam filters. My mail sever run Debian because it such an easy OS to maintain. However one problem is due to its slow release cycle (every 1-2 years) some of the packages can be quite old versions. This is the key to its stability but also a bit of a problem when your involved in an arms race like combating spam. SpamAssassin has been doing a good job but was slowly being outstripped by more and more spam specifically targeted at getting around its filters. Luckily I discovered backports.org which

provide nice apt repositories of the latest and greatest compiled for debian stable. Updating to the latest was a 5 second operation :-) I've already noticed a drop off with the newer filters catching more spam. I've also got the option of turning on the Bayesian filtering later if the tide gets too high again.