Apache SpamAssassin 4.0 Released With Many Improvements For Fighting Spam

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apache SpamAssassin 4.0 Released With Many Improvements For Fighting Spam

After years of work the Apache project SpamAssassin has released its much-improved SpamAssassin 4.0 open-source software...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apache-SpamAssassin-4.0

[Vorpal]

No singular wows in that list, but a bunch of decent improvements. The unicode stuff and better dmarc handling seem especially nice.

I might look into upgrading on my server, rather than waiting for the next Debian release.

[GieltjE]

Happy and surprised to see such a mayor release, had half the idea it was slowly dying.

Moved to rspamd a long time ago, inbound and outbound dkim support, proper MySQL/MariaDB and redis support and a lot of other nice to haves.

[ElectricPrism]

Remember when the Communications online like Email was administrated and moderated by impartial Spam Filters and not Humans?

It sure would be nice if Social Media could be a Protocol and NOT a Platform.

[ayumu]

I wish the work by the Dark Mail Alliance could accelerate. Email is no longer usable and long overdue a replacement.

Today, everybody but the largest providers such as Gmail is being excluded, with e.g. emails silently accepted then discarded. Long gone are the times where someone could reasonably run an email server and expect emails to reach the targets.

[archkde]

Remember when the Communications online like Email was administrated and moderated by impartial Spam Filters and not Humans?

It sure would be nice if Social Media could be a Protocol and NOT a Platform.

Social media as a protocol already exists in ActivityPub. A well-known application is Mastodon.

[cooperate]

I wish the work by the Dark Mail Alliance could accelerate. Email is no longer usable and long overdue a replacement.

Today, everybody but the largest providers such as Gmail is being excluded, with e.g. emails silently accepted then discarded. Long gone are the times where someone could reasonably run an email server and expect emails to reach the targets.

If you setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly, you shouldn't have problems with sending email. Also turn on DNSSEC if you can. After that, make sure your IP isn't on any blacklists.

[elatllat]

If only Microsoft would add a header for API users like Google and Amazon do... also if Spamhaus would not go crazy every 10 years.

[Vorpal]

If you setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly, you shouldn't have problems with sending email. Also turn on DNSSEC if you can. After that, make sure your IP isn't on any blacklists.

Indeed, and this works for me.

As I understand it, things are more complicated if you want to run a mailing list. You need to set up ARC, but that still needs the receiving server to trust you.

All ARC certifies is that you did the list processing. It seems flawed to me, it would be way better if it described what changes were applied so the receiver could reverse it and verify the original dkim signature.

[Vorpal]

If only Microsoft would add a header for API users like Google and Amazon do... also if Spamhaus would not go crazy every 10 years.

I get quite a bit of spam from random Gmail accounts. They are part of the problem by not spam checking outgoing mail.

I have tried greylisting, but it really isn't that useful. It catches very few things that wasn't already caught by dkim/spf/dmarc or plain old host name/ip checks.

Setting up some strict checks on hostname in HELO and reverse/forward DNS matching catches a lot by itself.

SpamAssasin catches most of the rest.