On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:57:30 -0700
Alan Connor <alanconnor@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Spam is UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and stopping it can only be done
> with a Challenge-Response mail program, such as the one I put together.
> There isn't ANY other approach that works.
You're wrong.
> There simply is no way that a "negative" approach will work. The "don't
> pass" list is infinite and its characteristics are ever-changing.
Actually it isn't that hard. I had some positive filters once. Filter
out mailing lists, filter out friends, filter out anything to/cc me, dump the
rest. Worked quite a while with very little false positives. Of course now
Bayesian filters do that for me.
> So they end up spending good money on programs that kill things they would
> like to see, and don't kill things they find objectionable, because these
> programs are obsolete a week after they are released.
You're wrong.
> To stop spam you have to decide who you WANT to hear from, and dump
> EVERYTHING else.
No, you have to decide to be an unsociable prick and put up with an
exceptionally high false positive rate.
> See? You aren't blocking spam, you are saving mail that MIGHT be spam
> to a directory and then reading through it.
Erm, if he's anything like me he isn't reading through it. I have a spam
catch. Hits anything between 5 and 8 on SA's score. I look at the subject
and who it's from. I don't *READ* it. Since it is in a separate box I don't
have to try to sort out fake from real, I'm sorting real from fake.
Furthermore since the SA score range is so narrow I only have 1-2 a day. What
do I do with it then? After I confirm it is spam (~1s scanning from/subject)
I mark it all, send it to the Bayesian filter as spam so it is caught later on
and then also fire it off to Vipul's Razor so it is registered there so other
people can dump it.
> Why? Because SpamAssasin doesn't work, and will never work.
Doesn't work?
root@teleute:/tmp/t# grep spamd * | grep clean | wc -l
2324
root@teleute:/tmp/t# grep spamd * | grep identified | wc -l
602
Of that 602 spam know how much got through?
root@teleute:/tmp/t# grep spamd * | grep identified | awk '{print $8}' | grep
\(\[567\] | wc -l
22
580 spam blocked outright. 482 of that spam was 550'd. Of the 22 that
got through that is spread across 5 local accounts and whatever the spammers
decide to try to forward through me to my friend for whom I am a secondary.
IE, <4 per account in the past WEEK.
Yeah, I can just imagine you hitching up your britches getting ready to
fire back a retort that you can boast that is 4 more than what you got. But
here's the real statistic. In that same amount of time I had 0 false
positives. How many did you have? I guarantee that it was more than 0. For
me stopping spam isn't the paramount importance. Stopping as much spam as
possible with *0* false positives is. Your pathetic system is the paragon of
false positives.
> If any mail comes to me from an email address or domain that isn't on my
> pass list, it goes to /dev/null and an auto-response is sent to whatever
> return address the sender supplied.
Neat! Tell me, what happens when the other person has a C-R setup, deep
sixes your challenge and fires off a challenge of his own. Oh, gee, guess
no-one gets to talk to one another since your mailers are too busy playing
email tag in an endless loop.
> Obviously, if the address is invalid, they never get the reply.
Obviously if everyone ran your hermitware no one would ever get any email
ever again.
> If the headers have been monkeyed with to the point that procmail can't
> process it, it goes to /dev/null. Non-conforming headers are a SURE sign
> that a mail is spam, because they are trying to get past your filters.
> Which they do, with programs like SpamAssasin.
Uh no, they don't. You really haven't used SA at all, have you?
> I don't get ANY spam. It ALL goes straight to /dev/null. If anyone wants me
> to read their mail, then they MUST give me their real email address.
Now tell me how much legitimate mail you've lost.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
| -- Lenny Nero - Strange Days
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