[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Almost off topic



"Peter L. Peres" <plp@actcom.co.il> wrote:

>  Spam export from the US is getting more and more "interesting".

[skipped]

>  I want to do something about it. One
>  direct thing, that relates to Linux, is a list of blacklisted hosts, that
>  originate spam, and instructions on how to set up a Linux mailer to bounce
>  them automatically (or delete them).

I have such a filter on plasma-gate, but have to say that lately, the time spent
on maintaining the steadily-growing reject list has begun to be comparable to
the time needed to click on the "Delete" button of my mailer - there appear a
few new spam originations every day. And you can't just do the rejection on a
per-host basis - for example, there are dozens of spam lists on hotmail.com, but
thousands of innocent people have their mail account there, too. So you end up
building a complicated From/Subject/... regex list, and it's very easy to do a
mistake - once I defined a bit more general than required regex rule to prevent
"Make money fast" messages, and only few weeks later discovered that one guy
from our group is a passionate numismatist and hadn't gotten few private e-mails
with very similiar subjects :). Etc. So I feel more and more like centralized
blacklists is a bad idea; and for the personal use, the default policy should be
"deny all" instead of "allow all", so to say. Then you add addresses of your
friends and maillists you're subscribed to to an equivalent of "hosts.allow" and
bounce all the rest to the sender asking to add a special keyword to a header.
If someone really wants to contact you, he'll do that. And spammers won't bother
themselves reading the bounces.

Regards,

Evgeny


--
   ____________________________________________________________
  / Evgeny Stambulchik  <fnevgeny@plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il>  \
 /  Plasma Laboratory, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel \  \
 |  Phone : (972)8-934-3610  == | == FAX   : (972)8-934-3491 |  |
 |  URL   :    http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/~fnevgeny/  |  |
 |  Finger for PGP key >=====================================+  | 
 |______________________________________________________________|