Re: MS mail bombs
Ron Johnson said:
> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 02:54, kmark@pipeline.com wrote:
>> On Sat, 20 Sep 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
>>
>> > On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 00:22, Steve Lamb wrote:
>> > > On Fri, 19 Sep 2003 23:08:42 -0600
>> > > "Walt L. Williams" <wwilliams@intergate.com> wrote:
>> > > > Is there anyone else out there being mail bombed with emails
>> > > > that look like there from M$? The rate at which their coming
>> > > > is increasing exponentially.
>> > >
>> > > My solution has been exim4, exiscan-acl, clamav, spamassassin
>> and liberal
>> > > use of shorewall's blacklist.
>> >
>> > Does that prevent the emails from being downloaded from the ISP's
>> > pop3 server in the 1st place?
>>
>> If us linux users can create procmail filters or other such things, why
>> cant the isp filter this stuff?
>
> They can, and they (or at least some) see it as an additional
> revenue stream.
>
Some see it as a possible negative revenue stream, either out of concern
over possible litigation or loss of customers if they start filtering all
mail and some customers throw a fit because the isp is filtering but that
wasn't in their service agreement or because of the potential extra tech
support load in getting everyone the filtering they want.
I'm not saying either of those are valid, just that they are reasons I've
been given. The real reason could be as simple as not wanting to go
through the effort of installing systems and not being farsighted enough
to see the benefits.
I think that Hotmail has a fairly easy system of giving the user options
as to what they consider junk, and what to do with it. You have three
levels of their junkfilter system with the highest being "it's junk if
they're not in my contact or safe list". You can easily manage your
contacts and safe list. You can add mailing lists to a special list of
safe email so that it gets through. You can block specific senders. And
you can add some pretty simple subject or from filters. You can opt to
have "junkmail" auto-deleted or moved to the Junk box where it is
auto-purged if it is more than seven days old.
There have to be ISP's using some other web mail control system that
provides these options as well. I've only come across it in Hotmail
because I haven't really looked anywhere else.
The hotmail setup is no user-customizable bayesian/Razor/etc
SpamAssassined/procmailed/Sieve rule set, but works for me. I use my
hotmail address on forms where I don't trust the collecting party to not
sell/give away my address and I have hotmail junkfiltering everything that
I haven't authorized. I can still get that 'your password is' message from
the Junk Box as long as I check within seven days but I never have to look
at or download the rest of the unsolicited/unauthorized email.
There have been many posts to the lists about using filter X to stop email
Y, rules and server overloads, and why debian-user posters are getting so
much email from this windows worm that I think we have all been in !spam
mode. I've had some thoughts (but I'm not saying they're good thoughts) on
the idea that I'll start a new thread for.
--
Jacob
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