[lug] Stopping the New Generation of Spam

[Bill Thoen]

Over the last 2-3 months I've been getting a *lot* more spam than ever
before and Spamassassin doesn't seem to be reacting fast enough or
effectively enough to deal with it. In particular, it doesn't seem to be
able to block these messages filled with random snippets of english
text and/or those where the message is embedded as an image. It also looks
like some of these spams are coming form large networks of compromised
machines (same message comes from many different unrelated IPs) so blocking
by IP is less effective. I used to get about 250 spams a day, but now it's
up to 350-500 a day, and it's increasing.

How are people dealing with this new onslaught? What sort of filtering or
tools work these days? If this keeps up it will eventually overwhelm my
little Linux server and become sort of indistinguishable from a Denial of
Service attack!

Or is this just the holiday rush where all the spammers just squeal louder
and shove harder trying to get their snouts into the trough?

- Bill Thoen