spam

Some time ago, in my battle against spam, I started using greylisting. Greylisting, for those not familiar with it, takes advantage of a standard fallback in email delivery systems. If a server is running but temporarily unable to accept incoming messages, it can send an error code saying so. RFC compliant servers are supposed to retry after a timeout period. Why is this useful? Because most spammers don't use compliant servers or don't have the time to retry.

I have long relied on CRM114 for spam filtering on my mailserver, and have generally been fairly happy with it. But it never hurts to try some alternatives, so I tried some lighter-weight programs: namely QSF and BMF. This was not a full-fledged test, mind you, just a report of my personal results.