Is blocking HTML e-mail an answer?
Posted to General. 2 Responses
Supposedly the US Department of Defense are blocking all “HTML-based e-mail”. I’m thinking this might be a good solution, depending on who you generally converse with.
Looking through my e-mail, all of the spam comes in HTML e-mails (image spam, junk mail, graphic ads) and all my legitimate e-mail is text (except a few people who insist on using HTML stationery, but who I could white-list or give ultimatums to). Put it this way, I don’t get any legitimate mail from unknown sources that’s both HTML and valid. Combining a weak white-list with blocking HTML mails from unknown addresses could probably eradicate 99% of my spam. Might be worth me writing a quick POP3 filter just to try out the theory..
December 26th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Hmm, do you not do a lot of online shopping? Ebay and Amazon spring to mind, I use both quite heavily (as with other etailers). Granted, as you said, whitelists could be created for those.
Still, combo-plating SpamAssassin, ClamAV, as well as a good selection of RBL’s on my server cut my spam rate by over 95%. Before my inbox resembled one of those virus honeypots (my addy is over a decade old). Now I barely get 1-2 a day.
So why bother with such a draconian approach?
Geoffrey
December 26th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
I am getting about 50 a day getting through all my various filters (which includes SpamAssassin at the server end and trainable clustering stuff at the client end). 98% of it is image spam. I guess some new rules for SpamAssassin might cover these..
I refuse to use RBLs as many are poorly run and not very discerning. As I have experienced (and blogged about), some jackasses will put you on their shitlists merely for bouncing back the crap they sent you, assuming it’s spam that originated at your end. I guess an open proxy RBL or two might be good though..