> Manuel Lemos wrote:
>
>> I just posted this
>> design proposal for an anti-spam add-on to Mozilla Mail/News
>
Just a general note about anti-spam:

I have been unfairly hit by anti-spam measures several times, so I fully 
agree with the EFF statement [1]: Anti-spam measures must not punish 
innocent senders.

My personal experiences:

MAPS DUL has a list of dial-up IP addresses, and many (about 10 or 20%?) 
smtp servers reject mail coming in directly from these addresses, 
claiming it were spam. See my Anti-DUL [2] page why that is a bad idea (TM).

From-based filtering does not work. From a naive POV, it might be a safe 
bet to consider anything from an email address which has previously been 
used as From address in a spamming as spam. However, From addresses can 
trivially be forged, and spammers routinely do that to not get the 
thousands of delivery failure messages. Often, they use invalid or 
throw-away addresses, which will only clog your database, but the 
premier assholes use addresses in their recipients database as From. A 
spammer once did this to me, sending out pheromone advertizing with 
ben.bucksch/at/beonex.com as From address. Imagine the fun on my part. 
Now, if that meant that my address would from now on be blocked my some 
people, that would be a real problem.

Even worse would it be, if my mail were not blocked, but silently (for 
me as sender) be deleted. So, IMO, the best thing to do would be to 
bounce the mail.

I oppose anything in Mailnews that encourages users to (probably 
unknowingly) reject (or even silently delete) mail which *could* be real 
individual mail from a real person.

If you do it carefully and responsibly, this could be a quite popular 
feature.

Ben

[1] <http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect14.31.html#II>
[2] <http://www.bucksch.com/1/opinion/dul/>

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