Re: Spam

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@debian.org>]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Anthony Towns wrote:

> The challenge/response should probably be the same sort of thing you get
> for subscriptions. This'd allow people who send mail from an address

And observation I've made is that the majority of true spam is sent to a 
large number of lists without using a CC in a fairly short time frame.

I suspect that if we did away with the challange/response bit of your
proposal and mearly looked for the above the amount of spam would be
dramatically reduced and nobody would notice.. Something to try, if it
isn't good enough we can certainly add challange/repsonse in.

> Adding a blacklist, or making it "subscriber to any debian.org list", or
> making the challenge/response require more intelligence, or making a single
> response work for all the stored messages from that person, would also be
> options.

Very good ones at that.

I know our listmasters are fairly busy, I *really* urge someone to write
up a script that can implement this. I'd envision it being fairly simple,
runnable as a pipe from procmail and return OK, DROP or DEFER. The mailer
queue can be used to hold and retry the message for a fair time. This
would drop in fairly easially to the existing rc.spam I think.

Jason