On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 02:35:09PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
On 1/6/02 2:35 AM, "Marc MERLIN" <marc_news@vasoftware.com> wrote:
of our websites, our upstream providers get anonymous complaints about "spamvertised website". They then waste their time relaying these
I receive abuse@sourceforge.net, so I'm very familiar with those too :-(
I hate to say it, but I effectively blackhole spamcop stuff. It's pretty useless to me as a postmaster of large mail list systems. I got tired of people using it as a tool to unsubscribe from mail lists because they're too lazy to read the instructions in the message, and since spamcop hides all useful data in the message they send to me, I toss them.
On the other hand, my favorite problem with this stuff is the time I ended up on the MAPs blackhole for hosting spam. It turned out that a subscriber to one of my mail lists (one with e-mail confirmation, I'll note) happened to be on a site that MAPs used an automated sniffer to find spam, and someone on that mail list sent out a message dsiscussing what she was going to do on vacation, and the MAPs sniffer decided it was a "you won a free vacation" spam, and wrote me up. So I got blackholed because two subscribers sent a legitimate piece of email to each other that was appropriate for the list they were on. Eventually, after having a discussion with Dave Rand, he figured out what was happening and promised to whitelist my site from further annoyance by the MAPs servers (what finally got me honked was that MAPs was testing my site for open relays about once a week. It turned out that the mail sent to my subscriber on that MAPs sniffer site was having the mail reported as spam or open relay about that often, and was actually losing a significant chunk of email to this "spam blocker"). They did whitelist me, for about three weeks, then the relay checks started again. At that time, I told my subscribers to move or get off the list (they moved), and put blocks up to prevent MAPs from contacting my server without permission, since I considered by that time their repeated scans an attack on my server.
So if you see me make comments about how I'm not a big fan of these blackhole systems, there are any number of reasons. This is just one of them.
I agree with you. I block mail claiming to come from spamcop with
550 Blocked due to excessive frivolous or false complaints
Spam is a distressing problem, and there are days I (as a postmaster) feel inundated, despite taking several measures. The sites I administer do DNS lookups, and decline to accept mail claiming to come from places that don't have some sort of valid DNS record. Using a 450, so they'll retry for a while. In case it's just a DNS screwup. This seems to dispose of quite a bit, and so far hasn't gotten me any angry phone calls. Everybody who cares at the sites I administer has individual procmail filters of varying strictness, and I sometimes spend a fair amount of time tuning them.
I can see how some people would feel desperate for a solution.
But I sure can't see letting automatic systems invoke sanctions. I guess I see this as somehow more reprehensible even than spam.
-- Dan Wilder <wilder@eskimo.com>