At 10:24 AM -0500 12/23/99, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>"Marc-Adrian Napoli" spake unto me and said:
> >
> > What i'm after is a solution that falls into place at the
> > qmail-send/qmail-local stage that will quickly check the
> > headers of the message to be delivered locally first for
> > any particular strings. (Silly email addresses or anything
> > with the word "buy now" or "sell now" etc)
>
>I recommend that you be _VERY_ careful with this idea,
>especially if you are an ISP. In particular, bouncing
>emails may anger your customers, and destroying emails
>can get your butt sued off.
>
>Suppose one of your customers is sent an email from his stock
>broker, saying "Sell Now!!!!" Your customer never gets the
>email, and loses his shirt, because of your spam "protection".
>You will deserve whatever happens to you.
>
>Other than RBL-blocking, and making sure _your_ relay is closed,
>I recommend that you only use filters which are _explicitly_
>approved by _each_ affected customer. Deciding for your
>_customer_ which emails look "bad" to _you_ is very foolish.
>
>Check out <http://www.pobox.com> for a good example of spam
>filtering which is _customer_ approved.
I agree with your sentiment completely. I don't want *my* ISP making
*any* of these decisions without my knowing, and I'd certainly want a
way of creating my own "tunnels" through any of their blocks.
But the example is poor, IMHO. I have a pobox account for non-work
related mail, and I had their spam filtering on for a while before
finally turning it off. It tagged things as spam that weren't. It
missed tagging most real spam. In short, it wasn't any help at all.
What I want them to offer, what I'd pay extra for, and what they
don't offer (at least the last time I checked), is RBL+DUL+RSS on my
incoming mail stream with the ability to tunnel selected IP's
through, and the ability to find out what was blocked. (Which is
exactly what I do use on my work machines with rblsmtpd.) DUL by
itself would catch most of the spam I get through my pobox account.
So since I can't RBL+DUL+RSS the mail passing through pobox in any
convenient way, I pass it through some maildrop filters on one of my
home machines and access it from there. In the end, only I know what
is spam and what is not, so I prefer dealing with the problem at the
end of the chain which I control rather than at the points in between
over which I have little or no control. Unfortunately, that means I
have to accept the spam in the before programmatically discarding it.
>
>Len.
--
Paul J. Schinder
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 693
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
