It's been about a week after I tweaked my mail configuration to further block spam and annoying messages. It seems successful, since my spam volume from 23:00 to 08:00 has decreased from 25+ messages to about 2 or 3, on a bad day. The key to this spam decrease was the simple installation of libnet-dns-perl and Pyzor, along with SpamAssassin. I've been using SA for awhile now, but since it was incapable of doing RBL lookups, it couldn't check to see if the source address was reported as an open-relay, open-proxy, or some other misconfigured server. Pyzor is also useful, since it checks if the digest of a message matches a known piece of spam in its online database. I've been trying to support the community by running spamassassin -r to report messages as spam.
I'm also realizing that being in the south has taken a toll on me, I think I'm starting to like some country music, now. I just picked up this CD from Best Buy, today. It's not bad ... ack.
Best Buy and Amazon in the same paragraph--you're going to hell.
I've actually stopped using RBLs. Honestly, they weren't doing all that much. Looking at my logs for the past three-four months they stopped 10 messages which I was willing to bet would have been caught by another rule. I started the experiment at midnight March 1st, and so far haven't gotten any spam (filtering is done during the SMTP transaction). I feel that for the most part the technology is there to handle spam without resorting to mass black lists. SpamAssassin is great.