Sam Thorne has put together a SpamBayes installer package for Mac OS X. The author even thoughtfully lists what the installer places on your system, a practice other installer authors should emulate. Nicely done, Sam!

Posted at 7:26 PM PST with these tags: mac, email, spam

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Charles Arthur talks about PostArmor in a recent review for TidBITS. He lauds PostArmor’s ability to stop spam at the server, which unfortunately isn’t really what’s going on (it still downloads all the message headers). PostArmor appears to be a decent solution for those without direct control over their mail servers, but a better solution would be to find an ISP with powerful server-side spam filtering.

Posted at 5:13 PM PST with these tags: mac, email, spam, tools

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SpamAssassin users with certain configurations may find that messages they receive are mistakenly flagged as spam coming from open relays. The problem, discussed in more detail on the Use Perl site (along with a fix), appears to be caused by a distributed denial of service attack on open relay blacklist maintainer Osirusoft, who is now returning back every IP as a spam source when queried.

Posted at 8:22 PM PDT with these tags: email, spam

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When mail servers are configured as open SMTP relays, anyone who knows the mail server address can send email through that server. Predictably, spammers often take advantage of open relay capability on mail servers to deluge the world with junk email. Apple has a new Knowledge Base entry on preventing open SMTP relay on Mac OS X Server 10.2.4 and later. A restricted relay only allows trusted users and IP address ranges to send mail, decreasing the odds that your domain will end up blacklisted by other ISPs because a rogue spammer hijacked your mail server.

Posted at 7:47 PM PDT with these tags: mac, email, spam

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