Re: fighting spam || avoiding spam
On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 05:40:45PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > > That said, I would be interested in knowing why we don't reject such
> > > messages. There's absolutely no reason to be running an open relay.
> >
> > That's not being "open relay", that's just not using the RBLs.
>
> No, I meant that blocking based on the *source* being an open relay or
> open proxy is acceptable, since there's no excuse for having such a
> system.
Oh, sorry, I see now that I parsed that paragraph wrongly.
> > In any event, I figure the main reason is that we always wanted all
> > the users to be able to send mail to us to report problems.
>
> Which I agree makes a lot of the spam reductions options (subscription
> required, or some of the extremist options like DUL blocking)
> unacceptable. The xbl.spamhaus.org appears to be based on fairly
> legitimate criteria, though: your site has to be a source of spam that
> is somehow magically fingerprinted as coming from an open proxy or open
> relay. That seems unlikely to affect someone struggling to get their
> Debian mailserver working, since the configuration scripts of both exim
> and postfix make it fairly difficult to set up such a system.
I figure that we wanted to also allow random people connecting from random
dialup IPs to be able to send mail to the BTS, too. For example, addresses
can be listed in a blacklist because a previously connected user had a virus
that allowed spammers to relay over them. Depends on the blacklisting
software/criteria, too.
> And since it would presumably bounce back to the correct person (rather
> than being dropped later), at least they would *know* they weren't getting
> through, and could be directed to fix it.
Yeah, SMTP time rejections likely remove the need to worry about most of
that. We could even have the rejection message point to a web page that
answers questions about it. But again this is non-trivial to get because
I have yet to see any debian-admin members very anxious to change the
exim3 configuration or convert to exim4 to get such features...
--
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