All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Scary spam levels

Matts on 2005-11-23T20:50:24

Last night I decided it was time to upgrade my installation of qpsmtpd on my home machine so that I could use the new poll() based server and get better stats and logging out of the server.

Up until then I knew I got a lot of spam, but never really knew how much mail I was turning away. The multiplexing qpsmtpd includes a config server and stats plugin that allows me to see how much mail I'm rejecting in real time.

So I restarted it some time this morning, and here's the current stats: 

          Uptime: 22228.91 sec
  Mails Received:         42
             5xx:       3501
             4xx:        183
(Mails Received is those that actually get past the spam filtering). So I've turned away nearly 4000 mails since this morning. And that's for two users on that domain. Yikes.

So now I feel a lot better about the fact that I get about 4 or 5 spams coming through each day.

tell me about it

jmason on 2005-11-23T21:12:07

I run into this problem all the time at work -- when people complain about the effectiveness of the post-SMTP-transaction spam classifier, they haven't taken into account the volume of spam that was silently rejected during the transaction...