My antispam filters are extensive and work extremely well.  While spam has not been eliminated, it has been reduced to one a day.  Perhaps two on a rare occasion.  The past couple of days, however, revealed what can go wrong with filtering.

My wife is a translator, editor, and proofreader.  She received a rush job to do some proofreading and editing of a document by a South Korean company.  Unfortunately for her, I had blocked South Korea with iptables (along with China) due to the excessive number of hack attempts and the spam spewing forth from that country.  While I’m sure I had told her I had blocked Korea, it was a long time ago.  When she mentioned the problem with her email I reminded her of the block, and promptly removed it.

The next day the email from the South Korean company bounced.  I had originally configured the system using a country specific list for South Korea and had never bothered to remove it when I implemented the block with iptables.  Oopsie.  I removed that.

The next day an email from the South Korean company bounced.  It scored 10.9 on SpamAssassin.  8.0 is the threshold.  I added the company’s domain to the whitelist.

I’m waiting to see what goes wrong next.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Geek Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.