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Re: spam sent to debian.org addresses



On Thursday 01 May 2003 15:36, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 08:53:31AM +0200, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von 
Bidder wrote:
> > A big part of the spam can be trivially blocked at the point where it
> > enters the Debian servers, using DNSRBLs and other sensible restrictions.
> > When it enters my mailer, it can not be trivially blocked as it comes
> > from murphy.debian.org which is a mail server I want to accept mail from.
>
> A lot of legitimate mail can be trivially blocked this way, as well, which
> is why it doesn't make sense to drop it on the server side.

For some arbitrary definition of 'a lot'. There is a wide range of dnsrbls 
available, with different goals. Blocking on the more conservative lists, 
like the spamhaus one, and on the open relay lists will hardly block any 
legitimate mail. Using lists like SPEWS or even spamcop will guarantee quite 
a bit of mail blocked (IIRC murphy has been in and out the spamcop list in 
the past, and I know that the AOL mailservers are in the spamcop list quite 
frequently). In the special case of an international project like Debian, 
blocking country level cannot be done for obvious reasons, whereas the same 
can easily be done even for a relatively large company with few foreign 
contacts.

Hmmm. Has anybody done statistcs about how many first-time/one-time posters 
there are on the Debian lists every week (particularly on *-users-*)? One 
thing that could be feasible is to use an automatic whitelist, with first 
time posters needing a much lower spamassassin score than regulars (those who 
are above the score would need to be approved - personally I'd think doing an 
email ping pong with those would not be a rude thing to do on a mailing list, 
as opposed to a private email address, but iirc I am in the minority with 
that opinion).

But there's a lot of old threads about these things, and I'm not going to read 
up, so I guess this should be my last post on this thread.

cheers
--vbi

-- 
NOTE: my email addresses in usenet postings change frequently!

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