[lug] ISP for antispam recommendations?

[Peter Hutnick]

On Tuesday 26 March 2002 08:47 pm, D. Stimits wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone here has an ISP in the Boulder/Longmont area
> that offers customized front-ends so that I could set up a personal
> blacklist of domains or senders to reject? I want it at the ISP level
> because I don't want to spend the bandwidth to download the 200 or so
> spams I get per day. Even if I don't read them and I delete as fast as I
> can, each morning I would have to spend at least half an hour repeatedly
> hitting the delete button. Lately I've reported them all to spamcop, my
> ISP claims that use blackhole lists, but they unfortunately seem to
> override it in the worst cases. I'm thinking it might be time to dump my
> ISP for someone that actually helps. In my location only 56k is
> available, there are no lines capable of DSL here, and so far cable
> modem service is non-existent. I consider the wireless solutions
> inferior due to the desire to have consistent low-latency connections
> (and last time I checked, less than a year ago, I was at the edge of
> normal range anyway).

ISPs tend to not want to do too much filtering since they don't want to be 
responsible for incorrectly junking important email.

Luckily, there is a happy medium between having your ISP handle all of your 
spam and handling it all by hand.

You can use procmail to customize the handling with any ISP that gives a 
shell account and uses procmail as the MDA.

Failing that you can use fetchmail to grab all your mail (potentially from 
several sources) and process it, delivering only the gems to your inbox (or 
better yet, sorting it to sensible IMAP folders).

This would still burden your 56k modem with downloading the SPAM, but let's 
face it, that isn't that big a deal.  The largest SPAM I could find on my 
system (I don't do any automated filtering, and I'm on 56k as well) was 11k.  
200 11k messages is less than 2.2M.  (I admit that I find your 200 messages 
figure suspect, and feel that 2.2M is a HUGE over-estimation)  Figure you 
only get a very poor 2k (that's k-bytes) per second that would total less 
than 20 min/day.  Less than one minute per hour.  Realistically we are 
talking about seconds per hour on average.

I'm no SPAM apologist, but I hardly see it as being a huge deal.

Either way, no need to specially pick an ISP to avoid it.

-Peter