Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 08:08:26 -0500, John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> said:I wrote:It didn't say that the secret had been received, only that debian-devel had been whitelisted. Nost likely, the user did so manually.manoj writes:And elected to recieve a message obviously spam and infected with a virus?How would he have known that? He had not seen the message yet if I understand correctly. In any case, it seems more likely that he whitelisted the address manually than that the virus successfully returned the secret.If I am going to whitelist addresses caught in my spam trap manually, the least I would do is to grep the relevant messages out of the spam trap and see if whitelisting is the thing to do. Most likely, some reader of the mailing list sent in the secret as pay back for the annoyance of these silly CR messages that seem hell bent on spamming -devel (indeed, there was a short discussion whether TMDA should be thrown out of Debian since it seemed to so cluelessly spam the list) manoj
FWIW I spent a few months working on how you might create a TMDA type of system only better. The idea was to only TMDA the addresses that appeared to be spam in the first place. That is to say, TMDA confirmation would only be executed on those addresses which failed to pass spamassassin.
However, it's a piece of junk.Confirmation Request business is essentially impossible to achieve 100% success. There are people who will reply incorrectly but with best intentions, thereby failing the confirmation and getting blacklisted.
There are automated responders from spammers and even postmaster REJECT messages that pass as a legitimate response, thereby getting whitelisted for the future.
What you end up with is a partial solution that is very aggravating.You block a lot of spam. But the Postive Replies mean that you receive a LOT of spam from very specific addresses. But they too are a moving target of addresses, so you are blocking and modifying this list all the time. You might as well just keep a blacklist and keep blocking and modifying that all the time. You really don't gain anyting significant in terms of spam blocking and you definitely don't gain anything in time saved.
-- He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream too. -- Lewis Carroll