There are, basically, three kinds of spammers: those using their own IP space and ISPs specialised in spam, those using open proxies and those using throwaway accounts with normal, respectable ISPs.
The spam and open relay blacklists that have developed in the past years are offering some remedy against the first two kinds of spammers. Far from perfect, but yet much better than nothing. Blacklists integrate nicely with courier; with half a configuration line they're up and running. Time, perhaps, to do something about the third kind of spammer, the kind that takes a dial-up subscription, pays the first month, spams full blast over a weekend and is gone by Monday morning when the bomb of spam complaints hits the abuse desk. Something like courier's MAXRCPT, but counting per day instead of per message. Something that says "no single IP in the range a.b.c.d/x can send to more than 1000 recipients per day, no matter what". A default limit which no normal user will ever run into, but which would all the same make the service useless to any spammer. This would allow ISPs to put a limit to their own customers, while still accepting any amount of mail from "foreign" servers. That, in turn, would invalidate the whole concept of throwaway accounts. You see, the whole idea of a throwaway account is to use the ISP's SMTP server. If the spammer uses his own SMTP server on his dial-up, he will be blacklisted in no time. Legitimate ISPs though, who deliver a lot of legitimate mail, don't get blacklisted as fast (and shouldn't either). That's the loophole that needs closing. Closing it would also enable the blacklists to implement stricter ratios for listing ISPs who still emit a lot of spam together with their legitimate mail. First mail server to offer the feature wins the year's anti-spam awards ;) Z ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: VM Ware With VMware you can run multiple operating systems on a single machine. WITHOUT REBOOTING! Mix Linux / Windows / Novell virtual machines at the same time. Free trial click here: http://www.vmware.com/wl/offer/345/0 _______________________________________________ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
