At 8:50 AM -0500 11/22/04, Bill Cole issued a series of ones and zeros which decoded as:
One of the best tools I have for making sure that legitimate mail gets in while keeping out the flood of garbage is tagged addresses. SIMS does not have automatic support for tagging, but it is easy to set up in the router, like this:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = realaddress-* <realaddress-badtag1> = spamtrap <realaddress-badtag2> = spamtrap <realaddress-*> = realaddress
Please, can you explain 'tagging' with an example?
Some years ago I switched my domain registrations away from the slimeballs at Verisign/NSI and provided my new registrar with a tagged address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Within a year, the spammers had scraped that out of the whois database and the address was getting a dozen spams a day. I turned it into a spamtrap with this line in the router in between the blacklist exemption and the detagging:
<bill-domdir> = spamtrap
Now, if someone mails [EMAIL PROTECTED], they hit a spamtrap. Dozens of spammers do this every day, years after the address became a trap.
If you give out addresses with tags, mail to them gets past blacklisting, but if specific tags get compromised you can turn them into spamtraps. I've used the same 2 base addresses for a decade on publicly posted stuff, but for the past few years I've been only giving out tagged addresses to specific business and personal contacts. This way, I can be sure that their mail evades the blacklists I use AND if those specific tagged addresses get spread to spammers, I can know where it came from and cease dealing with whoever is handing my address out.
So I'd use, for example, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" for corresponding with a particular client or entity?
Yes. Note that you can use any string you like as the tag identifier. Traditionally, sendmail used '+' and SIMS could use anything that could be expressed in the router.
I'm also now using subdomain-based tagging in a slightly different way, because it is more likely to be portable to Postfix when I get around to migrating.
-- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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