[PLUG] anybody using this?

[Steven Raymond]

Russell Senior said:
>
> With the recent degradation of effectiveness of SpamAssassin that
> I've been experiencing, I set off to investigate some ideas I'd seen
> earlier, including the Paul Graham's Bayesian scheme (see "A Plan for

Hmmm, that makes a question occur to me; has everyone (who runs their own
mail server) tried Postfix's built-in anti-spam measures?
Since I switched to Postfix and turned on most (all?) of the features in
main.cf, I receive fewer than 1 spam per week.  I take that back, last
week I received two (down from 10-15 per day before Postfix).

Reviewing my nightly Postfix log summary, so far this week it's received
497 emails, and rejected 161 or 32% blocked for spam.  Of the options,
Spamcop's blacklist seems to block about 70% of the total rejects.

Because of these what I consider excellent results, I have not endeavored
at all to look at SpamAssassin.  My satisfaction is particularly keen in
knowing that the spam is not even received by my Postfix, even if later to
be zapped by SA or some other tool.

So my questions are- why aren't the blacklists used by Postfix & it's
other tools used more commonly?  Or is it simply the fact that my measly
497 messages per week volume is much smaller than most folk's (including
less spam)?  Is it simply that most people don't run their own mail
server?

That reminds me of another SpamCop question.  I paid their $25 for a
"reporting" account, which gives me 25MB of spams for them to process (I
report the few spams I still get dutifully).  It isn't clear to me if/how
this contributes to the blacklist.  Do they take the combined complaints
against a mail server, and after a threshold add it to the blacklist?  Or
did that just get me only the "reporting" service?  Quite frankly, I don't
much care if the network admins get notified about their spammers, I'm
quite sure they don't care.  I just want to help feed the blacklist.  It
seems that querying their blacklist server via Postfix is free.  That's
where I would like my money to go- perhaps it did when I sent the $25.

Interested to hear other's results in blocking spam.