Related link: http://www.spambouncer.org
I have mostly been away from my unix account on PANIX, so I have not been irritated by all of the spam that has shown up in my inbox. After the MyDoom incident, I started to get a lot of it. I think the spammers must have made a slight jump ahead in the arms race. Now they purposedly misspell words and construct much more natural looking messages. After a quick download, I no longer have to see those messages.
Every time a get a surge of spam in my inbox, I simply update my SpamBouncer filters. It uses procmail behind the scenes, and the author, Catherine Hampton, updates everything religiously. I do not have to fool with anything. Indeed, I can update everything with a cron job if I was motivated enough to take the five minutes to set it up.
As far as I know she has never asked for anything in return, and everything is available under the Free Software Foundation’s COPYING principles (which seems a little more vague than being licensed as such). Hooray for open source and huzzah for community!
Seems like a great system - lots of features
Had been looking at Active Spam Killer and TMDA, but SpamBouncer seems more comprehensive in features though not sure how much traffic it can handle. Definitely seems worth trying. Says it can be installed at user level.
SpamBouncer is a de facto FPoS
SpamBouncer is a typical example of the cure being worse than the disease. My first encounter with this FPoS was a few minutes ago. I sent a message to a friend, only to see it returned a few seconds later. SpamBouncer proudly annouced to me that it identified my message as SPAM! Well, the HELL with this FPoS!
The next thing SpamBouncer will tell us is to... call the recipient on the phone and ask him/her to place me on some kind of a white list, or some nonsense like that. SpamBouncer, SpamHaus, and the rest of the self-proclaimed SPAM experts are WORSE than the SPAMmers themselves, wasting more users' time, destroying the immediacy benefit of email, killing productivity and aggravating us, while the SPAMmers themselves won't blink an eye.
I took the time to spend even more time than SpamBouncer wasted me, in order to register on this board and write this message to warn you all of this FPoS. Stay away from this SpamBouncer FPoS if you don't want to waste people's (and your) time and aggravate them to no end.
SpamBouncer is a de facto FPoS (*not*)
Sounds like your friend has the setting cranked up to 'paranoid', or you're using a known-spam-friendly ISP. I've been using SB for several versions now and it's always defaulted to less filtering, not more (if you do no configuring except enter your domain and such, it lets almost everything through, except for viruses and blatant spam). Also, if your friend had the password feature enabled, you would have gotten a message back telling you how to allow your message through, *even though* it thought it was spam.
Sounds like your friend has procmail configuration issues, rather than SpamBouncer not working properly. As for your "this is worse than the spammers" comment, as an e-mail admin, I spend significantly less time dealing with Spambouncer's config than I would if I had to delete all the spam that I get. (As in, I untar an update file once or twice a month, and I average less than one spam a day that's not caught.)
I suppose there's a chance that you're actually a spammer in hiding, posting negative comments to try to keep spam filtering off systems. In that case you probably *hate* SpamBouncer's ability to extract the sending PC's actual IP from the e-mail header, look up the ISP it's on, and file automatic abuse reports. Personally, I LOVE that feature.