Re: fighting spam || avoiding spam
On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 10:21:10AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
> I see no reason why the debian administrators should waste their time
> with these solutions when the end recipients should be quite capable
> of setting up their system with exactly the spam strictness that is
> appropriate for them.
Actually, unfortunately there is there is. My mail servers regularly reject
viruses that master.debian.org relays to me, and then it generates a bounce
and this goes through to me. In the last few weeks I got around 107 such
mails, 6.9 MB. If I had to directly pay for my bandwidth, I would have
a strong urge to become violent.
A very ironic example is the message below that I recently received.
----- Forwarded message from Harald Milz <xx@xxxxxx.xxx.xx> -----
Delivery-date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:03:09 +0200
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 22:55:37 +0200
From: Harald Milz <xx@xxxxxx.xxx.xx>
To: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@master.debian.org>
Cc: xxx@xxx.xxxxx.xx
X-Nospam: Sending UCE and Spam is _strongly_ discouraged.
Subject: Re: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
X-Spam-Level: **
Hi,
you sent me an automatic reply about a virus or worm sent to you. Please
mind that I've been using Linux exclusively on all my machines since
1993, and that a Windows worm or virus sure as hell does not originate
from my network. My mail gateway (xxxxxx) is a UUCP leaf node, and it
does not send SMTP mail anywhere.
If you check the headers of the original mail, you will see that the
Received: lines point to an arbitrary machine that is not my MX host
(which in turn runs FreeBSD).
Furthermore, as you probably know, all the recent worms fake the sender's
address. Thus, your automatic replies will only
- hit innocent bystanders,
- confuse computer-illiterate users who then think their computer
is virus infected, and
- increase the e-mail traffic caused by virii and worms by 100%.
So - please get a clue and set up your virus filter to NOT send any
automatic replies any more.
Thank you!
Best regards,
Harald Milz
On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 12:56:08PM -0500, Mail Delivery System wrote:
> This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).
>
> A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
> recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
>
> my@address
> (generated from mirrors@debian.org)
> SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
> host my.server [zzz.zz.zzz.zz]: 550 Message contains malware (Worm.Lovgate.X)
>
> ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
> ------ The body of the message is 175585 characters long; only the first
> ------ 102400 or so are included here.
>
> Return-path: <xx@xxxxxx.xxx.xx>
> Received: from gluck.debian.org [192.25.206.10]
> by master.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 1 (Debian))
> id 1BVDUM-0004Jd-00; Tue, 01 Jun 2004 12:55:50 -0500
> Received: from (xxxxxx.xxx.xx) [yyy.yy.yy.yyy]
> by gluck.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 1 (Debian))
> id 1BVDTJ-0005Tm-00; Tue, 01 Jun 2004 11:54:46 -0600
> From: xx@xxxxxx.xxx.xx
> To: mirrors@debian.org
> Subject: Test
> Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 01:58:10 +0800
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
> boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_D44F859E.546D8B80"
> X-Priority: 3
> X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
> Message-Id: <E1BVDTJ-0005Tm-00@gluck.debian.org>
>
> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
>
> ------=_NextPart_000_0000_D44F859E.546D8B80
> Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="Windows-1252"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> ×??V
> ?0>"?tD????`´???¨î9???Ë_??Ltâ?1P?ç??QO'????4tj?}k???e??
[...]
>
>
> ------=_NextPart_000_0000_D44F859E.546D8B80
> Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
> name="document.zip"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
> Content-Disposition: attachment;
> filename="document.zip"
>
> UEsDBAoAAAAAAEWPwS4CLmRXAPQBAAD0AQAMAAAAZG9jdW1lbnQucGlmTVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8A
[...]
--
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the
victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
----- End forwarded message -----
I've replaced the private addresses with x's and y's, and snipped
most of the attachment because the whole message was 113 KB (!).
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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