Re: Spam in the lists out of control
On Sun, 9 May 2004, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> El dom, 09-05-2004 a las 17:30, +0200, Marco d'Itri escribió:
> > On May 09, Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
> >
> > > Those who still do not see the need to make the lists closed for non
> > > subscribers or non registered people (via the whitelist), please
> > > propose a better solution.
> > Start using DNSBLs like SBL, XBL and DSBL, or have Blars Blarson try on
> > murphy the same recipes he uses to filter spam in the BTS.
>
> BlackLists are NOT an option, they should be killed because they are
> maintained incorrectly. Here in Spain some people does SPAM from ADSL
> connections and thus from time to time one of those black lists add ALL
> ADSL connections to the list and we cannot send mail to some places from
> our own mail server (some ADSL connections have static IP address and
> our ISP lets us setup our own MTA if we want). I'm not a spammer but
> since two or three years ago I was added to three or four lists of
> spammers and it's not a trivial task to be removed from them.
That's the typical FUD against blacklists.
There are blacklists and blacklists. Some of them block individual IPs.
Some of them block IP ranges. To be removed from a blacklist may be
difficult, easy, or (in some cases) absolutely trivial, depending on
the blacklist (see cbl.abuseat.org for an example of the last case).
Please let us not repeat the mistake of putting all the blacklists
in the same bag. They are very different.
> > Or at least the listmasters should block the spam sources which are
> > reported to them week after week.
>
> That's a better solution also, a good spamassassin with some feedback
> could help. I think Santiago said here some months ago that the Debian'
> Spam daemon was not working correctly, perhaps it's only a matter of fix
> it.
No matter how well the filters at lists.debian.org may work, there is
no "fix" for the fact that list volume increase linearly (at most)
while spam increase exponentially.
We can change list policy now and require people to subscribe or
register to the white list for they to be able to post, or we can
continue to discuss about this while the spam level reaches 50%, then
80%, then 95% and we collectively spend several hundreds more time
deleting junk than the time a few people would spend subscribing or
registering in the white list.
Why is the time of the current subscribers several orders of magnitude
less valuable than the time of those who did not subscribe, that's one
of the mysteries of debian list policy.
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