new email server and spam

About 2 weeks ago we switched to Zimbra Collaboration Suite. I finally had time to do this, after working on it on and off for about 7 months. It replaced a homegrown Postfix, Courier IMAP, Spamassassin setup running on Gentoo. I've been running my own email server for a very long time... first RedHat 4-5 on a DEC Alpha, then on SuSE 7, then Gentoo. Back in the old days a misconfigured server didn't really matter much. Yes, there was a time I even (unknowingly) ran an open relay. Seems like in about 2000-2001 things needed to be much tighter. And now it's to the point I'd rather not configure each daemon individually.

Zimbra is treating us great so far -- our little company and all the friends and family that have been on my mail server for so so long.

One thing that concerns me -- more spam seems to get through. Well, it turns out that my old Postfix setup was probably a bit overboard. It was particularly nasty to incoming connections that:

1. Lacked a reverse DNS lookup
2. Came from a Dynamic IP
3. Reverse DNS didn't match their HELO

So, I'm trying to be nicer now. Not everyone's mail can come through "proper" channels I guess. Much of the time it's out of a person's control, their ISP might not know what they are doing.

I'm trying to teach the Bayesian filter about spam and ham. Zimbra is supposed to do this when someone drags the email to the Junk folder or if they click on the Junk button in their web interface. I'm not totally sure. And since they've abstracted me from sa-learn, I can't run it directly without passing it a bunch of switches so it can find itself in the /opt/zimbra tree.

I've decided to try to attract some spam. How better than to post an email address here? How about scrapeme1@srcbin.com that sounds good. Yes, scrape me would like some unsolicited email. For those wondering about "Scrape," it is what people used to do computer screens to get information off of them -- usually in a terminal application. After the web got interesting data, web scraping took off. Spammers build "robots" or "bots" to traverse the web looking for text that looks like email addresses. Mostlikely, scrapeme1@srcbin.com will look fresh and desirable to spammers and will hopefully spread around a bit on some lists.