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Stopping Spam
 
 
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Stopping Spam (Paperback)

by Alan Schwartz (Author), Simson Garfinkel (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  (20 customer reviews)


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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
If unwanted advertising is filling your e-mail and clogging up your favorite newsgroups, or if you're a system administrator plagued by spammers, you'll love this book. Schwartz and Garfinkel examine the growth of spam and give readers the tools to help end the problem.

The authors first explain why spam is more than just a mere annoyance and offer solutions that anyone with a basic knowledge of how the Internet and e-mail work can understand. Readers without such knowledge needn't worry--the chapter on Internet basics can get them up to speed.

Schwartz and Garfinkel demonstrate technical, political, and social approaches to keeping spam out of your mailbox and off your system. They discuss the many ways spammers falsify their mail, using fraudulent techniques to disguise where they come from. The authors show you how to avoid being fooled and what you can do to help catch abusers and make them responsible for their misbehavior. --Elizabeth Lewis

From Library Journal
Spam?or junk E-mail?drives some folks completely nuts, and they will eat this book up. Schwartz and Garfinkel start with a definition and history of spam and a discussion of the players and how protocols work. They then take up dealing with spam through filtering and dealing with Usenet spam. They also discuss how Internet service providers can manage spam and how community action has been and will continue to be the best deterrent. What is perhaps most interesting about this book is how it demonstrates that the line between managing spam and freedom of expression and censorship is almost nonexistent. for general collections.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details
  • Paperback: 197 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly; 1 edition (October 1, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 156592388X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1565923881
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,231,418 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
    (Publishers and authors: Improve Your Sales)

Alan Schwartz's latest blog posts
       
 
Alan Schwartz sent the following posts to customers who purchased Stopping Spam
 
8:09 AM PDT, June 12, 2007
If you're not familiar with greylisting, it's an antispam (and antivirus) technique that relies on the propensity of bulk emailers to simply blast out messages as quickly as possible to as many as possible without spending resources ensuring reliable delivery. Greylisting takes advantage of this behavior by initially refusing to accept an email message and telling the sender that there's a temporary failure and they should try to redeliver the message later (say, after 5 minutes). If the message is redelivered thereafter, it's accepted. If redelivery is attempted too soon, the message is rejected.

I've always been resistant to greylisting because it adds delay to mail and, unlikely other spam filtering techniques, punishes legitimate senders as much as spammers. But I finally decided that my time was too valuable to deal with the amount of spam I was receiving across several email accounts, so I bit the bullet and implemented greylisting on my mail server.

As you may recall, I use postfix, and I chose postgrey as my greylisting package, which works as a postfix policy server. I chose postgrey because it was well-developed, easy to integrate into postfix, and provided some key features to limit the detrimental impacts of greylisting.

First, postgrey lets you have a list of whitelisted client addresses whose mail doesn't get greylisted. I populated this from my SpamAssassin autowhitelist: any class B ip block in my SA autowhitelist that didn't have any entries with positive spam scores, had at least one entry with spam score < -2, and had at least 2 entries overall got listed. This seemed like a reasonable set of criteria for blocks that were generating all ham and no spam. Postgrey also comes with its own default whitelist for some common internet sites that have broken mailers that don't do redelivery correctly; a similar list is here.

Postgrey also has its own autowhitelist. After 5 successful deliveries (by default), the client is no longer greylisted. Finally, I reduced the delay for accepting new messages from the default 5 minutes to 1 minute.

Prior to implementation (March 2007), I was receiving about 75 messages an hour, of which 55 or so were spam, 1 was a virus, and 19 wanted. Now (June 2007) I'm receiving about 20 messages an hour: the same 19 wanted ones, 1 spam, and almost no viruses. (I went into this for spam reduction, but the virus reduction is also a great benefit).

Greylisting's not for everyone, and I still sympathize with others who share my former discomfort with the message, but for me, it's provided a really powerful increase in my email signal-to-noise ratio.