Re: Red Alert: Spam // Re: Yet another list statistics for debian-edu

[Ronny Aasen <ronny@skolelinux.no>]

Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> 
>> I can set you up as a moderator of commits@skolelinux if you want
>> experience with listadmin. :)
> 
> So I guess it is decided to moderate the list and I think this decision
> should be _acted_ on now-ish.  I have no idea why debian-edu lists seems
> to attract much more SPAM than other Debian lists - but it does somehow.
> 
> And, BTW, thanks for the Trondheim gathering.  It was productive and fun!
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>         Andreas.
> 

we are not "attracting" spam, but some spammer just happen to use our
address as the "sender" of all the junk they spew out.

then some badly configured mailservers bounce the spam, but does not
specify that it actualy is a bounce. And we get the backscatter. It's
just coincidense what email address the spam engines chooses for a
sender address. at the moment it is debian-edu@l.d.o it will probably
last as long as the spam run lasts. (a few weeks, perhaps a month or 2)
and  then it's someone else that gets the unfortunate honor of beeing
the "sender" of spam.

There are tools like SPF and Domain keys that are used to verify a
sender address. but they are not a silver bullet, and have drawbacks.
A badly configured mailserver would probably not heed it (SPF) anyway so
the difference would be nill.

Ronny