Archive - Sep 2, 2008

Date

ASSP utilises a feature called "greylisting" to combat spam - based on the idea that most spammers do not use RFC compliant mailers:

Greylisting is a new weapon to use against spam in this great war being waged upon it. With this new shielding method, by which you may block out huge amounts of spam, you are sure to please your email clients!

In name, as well as operation, greylisting is related to whitelisting and blacklisting. What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a "try again later"-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again - but this is where spam loses out! Most spam is not sent out using RFC compliant MTAs; the spamming software will not try again later.

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I have started using the ASSP proxy for Spam-fighting on a separate computer from the main mailserver - to reduce the load on our main server

The ASSP server project is an Open Source platform-independent transparent SMTP proxy server that leverages numerous methodologies and technologies to both rigidly and adaptively identify spam. This web site's domain name, "ASSPSMTP", is the common name used for the daemon or service running ASSP.

[From Welcome - ASSP Wiki]

And it is really super easy to set up under OsX, just copy the (unpacked) folder from the Web download page, and start it with :

"perl assp.pl" - just make sure nothing else uses port 25.

The access the management page on port 55555 of the computer it runs on.

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The ASSP Wiki has a quite severe error in it's description of how to add reports on emails that have been wrongly categorised using the email interface (the easiest way to do this for a "normal" users.

As default the following is wrong :

ASSP's email interface is an easy way to add addresses to the
whitelist, report spam, or false-positives.
To use it you must have it enabeled in the configuration, and have
names set for the addresses.
The interface only accepts mail addressed to addresses at any of
your localdomains, and only from "Accept All Mail" hosts, or
authenticated SMTP connections.
assp-white -- for whitelist additions
assp-spam -- to report spam that got through
assp-notspam -- to report miscategorized spam

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When you read the following - remember that Norway only has 4.5 mill people living in the country!

I find this extremely interesting.

Twingly announced recently the largest website in Norway VG Nett with over 2.5 million unique visitors each week launched Twingly Blogstream on their site. VG Nett hopes to enrichen the articles on their site by showing links to good blog posts related to the topic of the article. They also wish to give more attention to “clever bloggers out there”. Twingly now has the top two largest Norwegian newspapers as partners, VG.no and Dagbladet.no. Our previous coverage on Twingly. [From Twingly Blogstream launched by the largest Norwegian media site VG.no]
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This ebook reader for the iPhone/iPot comes highly recommended :

Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh or Windows laptop or desktop an enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza.

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