Khalil Abbas writes: > ok now I'm really fed up! this is too freaking much!!!! incoming > incoming incoming they never stop!!!
This is not new. We all deal with it. There are several good suggestions on reducing spam flow to Mailman (which reduces the burden on your systems) in the FAQ. There are patches for SpamAssassin and SpamBayes integration into Mailman (but they are severely deprecated unless there is *no* alternative; if you don't understand why, it is strongly suggested that you learn because it's quite fundamental to spam reduction; there are plenty of threads in the archives so I won't repeat the litany here). > please, is there anyone who can refer to articles about how to know > the source of these messages and how to report them to their ISPs > and to there authorities ??? The traceable sources of the messages are indicated in the "Received:" headers, which you can view by reading the message into a text editor, and partially confirm from your MTA logs. You need to be careful about tracing back from your MTA, because those headers can easily be spoofed. When you are pretty sure you have identified a source, you use the whois service to confirm the ISP, and find the address for abuse reports (usually ab...@isp.com; if that bounces, postmas...@isp.com; if that bounces you're basically out of luck). However, those are almost never the real sources. You will find that they are machines that have been subverted as part of a botnet, and the real source is well anonymized. Reporting to the authorities is generally not very useful, because they are way underfunded for chasing spammers starting from a spam message even in the U.S. China and Russia are way worse, and there is some suspicion that some authorities in many countries are in cahoots with the spammers. > common people MUST be educated about this!! so if we kill 10% of > the spam going on it will be a big achievement! I teach for a living, and I can tell you that you can lead a student to the library but you cannot make him read. Forget about "educating the common people".[1] They're mostly safe inside their walled communities at AOL, Google, and Hotmail, and are happy to blame the occasional interruption on *your* system or on "the mail system" or even on "the spammers". But they just don't want to know about the actions that would really be effective in stopping spam. Footnotes: [1] Including alleged experts. The first spam I ever got from inside my university firewall was sent from a machine owned by the head of the engineering school, a computer science professor. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9