[Spambayes] Fight Back - TarProxy

Andrew Walkingshaw andrew-spambayes at lexical.org.uk
Tue Aug 12 18:19:21 EDT 2003


On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:11:47PM +0100, Toby Dickenson wrote:
> 
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/spambayes/2003-January/002866.html

It's a standard anti-spammer tactic called "teergrube" (German for
tar-pit, I believe). It's implemented by a fair amount of
mail-filtering software; the first place I encountered it was in Ian
Jackson's GNU SAUCE package, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/sauce/ 
(disclaimer; it probably popped up somewhere else before, but I know
Ian and have used SAUCEd mail systems on and off since ~2000/2001.)

The thing about SAUCE is that it's exceptionally aggressive about mail
misconfiguration (a particular example being MX-points-to-CNAME in the
DNS, which it treats as grounds to reject mail); thus, it's not for
everyone, including me (I don't use SAUCE for this reason, as I have
to exchange mail with people on misconfigured ISPs)[1] - though much
of its tactics might be of interested to people looking at this kind
of approach.

Best wishes,
- Andrew

[1] I have no interest in having an argument over degrees of
misconfiguration here :)

-- 
email: andrew at lexical.org.uk                        http://www.lexical.org.uk/
Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge              http://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/
DJ, CUR1350 - http://www.cur1350.co.uk/  blog: http://www.lexical.org.uk/blog/



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