[BBLISA] State of spam filtering?

[John Miller]

>
> I noticed the OP was sending from brandeis.edu.  I presume he's hosting tens of thousands of email addresses, for students and staff.  Even with volume and educational discounts, the cost can be significantly high, just because the number of users is so high.  And it all needs to be run on private educational institution funding resources.
>

Yes - we are indeed running thousands of e-mail addresses.  I won't say 
tens of thousands just yet, but certainly more than 1000, less than 
100,000 :-).  In going with a third-party filtering service, cost would 
definitely be a factor.

Since Brandeis has "gone Google," at least according to the ads in North 
and South Stations, we would ideally outsource our MX services to them. 
  I'm doing so for my personal domain, but doing so for thousands of 
e-mail addresses is a little more challenging.  There are things to 
think about like how to treat prospective students, how to handle e-mail 
aliases to mailing lists, how to do directory sync, etc.  All probably 
doable (plenty of other folks have done so), but it takes time.  As 
things stand, we can currently do our own mail routing before it goes 
off to its final destination.

For full disclosure, we're currently using greylisting, reverse lookups, 
then various RBL checks (Spamhaus, Barracuda, Spamcop) and a bunch of 
SMTP syntax checks before we even make it to Spamassassin.  Still 
doesn't catch everyone, unfortunately.

For now, I think we need to make sure we're running the latest SA, 
update our rules, then see where we stand.

John