Re: Spam detection & rejection

[Jussi Silvennoinen <jussi_nahant silvennoinen net>]

> This Q isn't specific to Nahant, but otoh there are probably a few 
> thoughtful souls here with useful thoughts and opinions on the topic, 
> and the volume of email isn't so great as to cause those thoughtful ones 
> to skip over lots of stuff.
> 
> I see two main ways "chicken bone" spammers garner email addresses:
> 1. Scan usenet, web sites and email lists (how many are subscribed here 
> to harvest email addresses?) and collect addresses that way.
> 2. Enumerate likely addresses such as 
> {bob,paul,john,susan,suzanne} example com 
> 
> The first is susceptible to harvesting some spambait addresses such as 
> those in my sig.
> 
> The second one can spot my manually pursuing logs (or better, logwatch 
> summaries) for bounces.
> 
> So far, most attention I've seen for blocking spam has centred on black 
> lists, some free some not. Maintaining these lists necessarily involves 
> some delay while reports are evaluated and updates created. Then there 
> are ideas such as grey-listing, teergrubbing (spelling?), sender-id and 
> such.

You might want to move this to a MTA-list, which ever you prefer. There 
are policydaemons for Postfix which do this & tons more already. And 
writing your own isn't exactly hard. IMO blacklists are more a PITA than a 
useful tool. Throughout the ages, lists have been poisoned by ego's and 
that has not changed.

-- 

  Jussi