>It's a retorical question, but you get my drift. Bulk E-mail >spam has changed the nature of the net forever and there is no going back. >*Somebody* is going to have to make some small sacrafices in order for >us to get rid of this crap, and it may (unfortunately) end up being the >owners and operators of legitimate mailing lists. One of the hard lessons in life is that in a free society, you must continually fight to defend your freedom. While your proposal has many positives, at the core, it is a throwback to a centrally managed system that is the antithesis of the promise of the Internet. As such, it is doomed to failure. I think each site is going to have to approach SPAM filtering their own way. Let me describe what I am doing to fight SPAM at my site and on my e-mail lists. Not only do I manage and moderate a few e-mail lists, I also take care of e-mail connectivity for the company I work at. We've been hard hit here by SPAM since many employees were quite active on Usenet and investment lists the second we got on the Net. I considered it a challenge to block or blunt the attempts of SPAMmers to sneak advertisements into our company. I went out and read up on all the cool new features of Sendmail 8.8.8 and installed a four level SPAM blocking system in our sendmail.cf. I used the information found in Ron's handy blacklist to seed my database of sites to block or deflect. This action cut down on about 40% of our inbound SPAM. I then went out and found the SPAMCAN patches for Sendmail. These have been a godsend. I patched SPAMCAN so that it still forwards the e-mail to the intended person, but puts a special SPAMtag into the first line of the message. I then taught the employees how to write a filter to remove these marked messages from their Inbox and into a separate folder for them to peruse at their leisure. I did this because I'm afraid of someone sending a legitimate message subject of, "I have tons of $$$$ and I want to buy your products" - I don't want to accidentally trashcan a message like that! (The $$$$$ can set off the filters since it is used in the Subject line by a lot of SPAMmers.) Even though the employees still look over the SPAM (most can be deleted simply by looking at the >From or Subject lines), they don't seem to mind because the messages don't appear in their Inbox. It feels like a small victory. This worked pretty well, but then started to not work so well. The SPAMmers were changing tactics and headers and Internet providers and more were making it through my filters. What to do? The third weapon in my arsenal is a public folder I created called "Junk Mail". Whenever an employee finds some SPAM that did manage to bypass my traps and is not marked with the SPAMtag, they place it in this folder. Every month or so, I go through the folder, looking for common sources (so I can block IP banks) or common headers (so I can SPAMCAN messages with new filter entries). I have found Ron's recently released ipw tool useful in tracing IP blocks to a common source. This combination has proven to be quite powerful. Employees who got the worst of the SPAM report the amount of SPAM they now get has been cut down by 98%. But how does this relate to e-mail lists? Already, my lists are protected by the same IP-block rejection and destination/source filtering that protects employee e-mail. And I've modified majordomo to reject any inbound message marked with my special SPAMtag. I have one fully moderated list - I've only had to delete one SPAM message from it in over three years. I have a handful of unmoderated lists and digests. Majordomo screens out about 5 SPAM mails per week. I think two have gotten through in the past three years. So, none of this may apply to the smaller list owner not running their own site. But a lot of us here also have other network administration duties that might include generic e-mail service. For those in this position, I highly recommend looking up the new SPAM filtering methods found in Sendmail 8.8.8. I also recommend the SPAMCAN patches to Sendmail. They've made handling SPAM at my site a lot more fun. :-P -todd- http://www.sendmail.org/antispam.html http://consult.ml.org/~timb/spamcan/ http://www.e-scrub.com/cgi-bin/blacklists.cgi <<-- used to be there, at least - site was down when I wrote this
