RE: Spam Control Considered Harmful
On Tuesday, October 28, 1997 11:27 AM, Alex Bligh [SMTP:amb@gxn.net] wrote:
The Moral Majority and The Promise Keepers and other fundamentalist groups sit on white horses waiting to ride in and save us from ourselves. What is being said below needs to be considered. Firstly, Paul mentioned the need to have strong checks and balances. What does that mean and how do we keep him honest and ensure "we are using our powers for good"?
I personally do spam filtering for our site. Actually, it's not "spam" filtering per se. If you don't have a domain in the from addr which resolves, your mail is rejected. If you are not a customer of ours and try to relay mail off our servers, your mail is rejected. This to me seems completely just. Why should you send mail with a false return to address and why if you are not my customer should you send mail? Now, filtering based on hostname & blackholing is a bit extreme. It limits the user's right to choose. As long as the commercial soliciter has a valid reply-to address which you can use to bitch and complain, then I feel it's fine. However, I believe repeated unsolicited commercial email is harassment. For the same reason you can't call a person on the phone in the US 4 or 5 times unsolicited (it's against the law last I checked). It's wasting my time. On the Internet, it's wasting my bandwidth and resources. Does anyone have any stats on what percentage of networks is spam? I figure probably around 5%. Jordan -- Jordan Mendelson : www.wserv.com/~jordy/ Web Services, Inc. : www.wserv.com
On Tue, 28 Oct 1997, Jordan Mendelson wrote:
I personally do spam filtering for our site. Actually, it's not "spam" filtering per se. If you don't have a domain in the from addr which resolves, your mail is rejected. If you are not a customer of ours and try to relay mail off our servers, your mail is rejected.
This to me seems completely just. Why should you send mail with a false return to address and why if you are not my customer should you send mail?
These are standard features to most sendmail anti-spam/anti-relay patch sets. Now, what about blocking mail if it's passed to you by a host that has no in-addr.arpa record? I've recently started doing this on a few systems since I've found that some spam providers (either because they move too frequently, don't want to be resolved, or just don't have a clue) don't have reverse DNS. I'm blocking several hundred messgaes/day per system and get log entries such as: sendmail[1725]: Ruleset check_relay ([207.199.68.35], 207.199.68.35) rejection: 418 obtain a hostname So far, I've gotten no complaints, so I assume nearly all the mail that can't get in is junk mail.
Now, filtering based on hostname & blackholing is a bit extreme. It limits the user's right to choose. As long as the commercial soliciter has a valid reply-to address which you can use to bitch and complain, then I feel it's fine.
What about valid (i.e. resolvable) from addresses that are invalid for mail delivery? i.e. if you get a lot of spam, surely you've gotten messages from who knows where, claiming From addresses like 897632@aol.com. Sendmail rules will resolve that, but email a complaint there, and it's likely to bounce. I've not figured out a sendmail rule for blocking such mail from: addresses. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lewis <jlewis@fdt.net> | Unsolicited commercial e-mail will Network Administrator | be proof-read for $199/message. Florida Digital Turnpike | ______http://inorganic5.fdt.net/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key____
participants (2)
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Jon Lewis -
Jordan Mendelson