reject on black, filter on grey

reject on black, filter on grey

Posted Feb 24, 2006 13:53 UTC (Fri) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
In reply to: Actually they don't bother with state by AnswerGuy
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to bayesian spam filters

While greylisting makes sense for the reasons other contributors suggest, you might spend less time and have fewer manual false discards
going through your spam folder if you reject more of the very high probability spam at the MTA level. Checking manually what went into the spam folder is quicker and better on doubtful messages only or there will be too many in the spam folder to do this job accurately.

Also occasional genuine messages getting rejected by the MTA that accepts mail from across admin boundaries will result in a bounce to the sender, while not sending bounces to innocent victims, e.g. which happens if you reject at an internal incoming MTA. I set spamassassin score > 10 to MTA reject and > 7.5 to go to my spam folder via procmail. I also use the spamhaus DNSBL which currently rejects about 900 spams a week on my server and with which I have never seen a single false positive in about 2 years use, and use less reliable DNSBLs e.g. spews for spam folder filtering.

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