Sendmail and Spam

[David Anasco]

Fortunately my organization does not get that much spam. Compared to most, hardly any at all. Is this because we are using sendmail on a Solaris box as our mail server? We are also using non Microsoft cliets on the user's desktops to access email. Is this also a factor in our being nearly spam free?

[IchNiSan]

Hmm, the level of spam recieved is related to a number of different things. First of all, the visibility of email addresses from your company on the web plays a big part, i.e. how many employees have signed up for various sites using their work email address, etc.. Whether of not you have email addresses listed on your websites, lots of different ways of gaining visibility.

The mail client you are using should play little or no role at all in the ammount of spam you recieve(although there are several clients out there which have builting spam filtering, but by default they should not delete them, merely move them to a different folder or something. I SUPPOSE that internet explorer, combined with the microsoft mail clients could somehow lead to more spam, if there were someway to use scripting on a web page to figure out email addresses from internet explorer/outlook, but I DO NOT KNOW, and I would suspect that IE and outlook would have to be almost completely unpatched for something like that to work, just speculating here. Maybe someone else here has more insight on this.

The mail server you use should not play much role either in how much spam you recieve, although how it is configured will make a difference, and there are lots of different mail servers which can be configured to be unfriendly to spam. If your admins have sendmail setup to use a blackhole list(lists maintained of open mail relays) that would block quite a bit of spam as the mail server would not accept any mail from known open relays. Also there are several applications which will filter spam, for an open source solution, your admins could be using spamassassin, there are a few other apps as well, mostly commercial but I remember hearing of at least one other open source app.

[Lebb]

I avoid spam by not giving permission to use my address, still I will use a de-spammer at home at least