I'm surprised we haven't taken the easiest step of all of spam
prevention: putting the directory behind some sort of CAPTCHA as well as
password protecting the lists of all the system administrators on
campus. As a student I deleted myself from the directory and never had
a single spam. When I started working for the university, I was added
to the online directory (you cannot opt out of it) and to the list of
system administrators, and that's when the spam started for me.
Individual units can use something among the lines of what we've done here:
http://jmc.msu.edu/faculty/show.asp?id=2
I use a graphic for the @msu.edu part and text for the email address.
This would stop all but the most sophisticated harvesters.
For those of you who would say that captcha would cause some sort of
accessibility problem, I'd propose using a form of some sort that asks
some sort of question, such as what is 2+2. I've used that sort of
modification on a forum I run, and it's been a pretty good solution for
automated registration bots. (I ask the question, are you a spammer, and
only a 'no' will get you past).
Doug Nelson wrote:
>>
>> Are others also seeing a dramatic improvement?
>>
>
> I'm seeing fairly significant improvement. I haven't tuned SpamAssassin
> locally, but my mailbox which collects the centrally-flagged spam is showing
> much lower volumes. I will often receive 1,000 messages in my spam box over
> a typical weekend - this weekend, it was under 100. Of the messages which
> evade the spam filtering, I maybe see 5-10 per day where I saw 20-30 before.
>
> Doug
>
>
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