On Tuesday 20 October 2009, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: >Gene Heskett wrote: [...] >Since your not the recipient mailserver, (your upstream server is) and >I presume that your upstream is NOT running SA or doing any filtering >(otherwise you are effectively wearing 2 condoms, on on top of the >other, and wasting a lot of CPU on your system scanning mail that has >been scanned already) you are effectively telling the spammers that they >have a valid e-mail box and encouraging more spam.
They are running a spam filter, some sort of am M$ thing that still lets about 1 to 2 thousand a week through. Gmails is far better than verizons, but I have NDI what they are running for a filter. The tv stations server used to produce 10,000 a week, but is getting better, now maybe 50/wk. >If you have control of the destination IP address the spammers are >sending spam to, (the upstream) you can configure your MTA to issue an >error 550 then disconnect when a source IP address on an Internet >blacklist attempts to pass you mail. I can't do that, I'm just pulling whats they miss with fetchmail. >Not only does that save your >bandwidth but if the spammer is relaying spams through an open >mailserver, that will cause the compromised sending mailserver to bounce >the relayed spam to it's administrator's mailbox (assuming that it's >properly configured) which might ring the clue phone of the >administrator managing the compromised mailserver, or if that doesn't >work possibly consume all free disk space on the compromised server, >thus causing it to crash and cease being a nuisance to the rest of >us on the Internet. Verizon has such a compromised server right now, and I have sent several samples of the bogus messages it is sending me 20x a day of, for over a week now, no response and no change. As long as it makes vz money, they don't care. If there was another provider in my area, I'd be gone in a heartbeat. Cable might work, but they want 2x more a month and always have. >SA is useful dealing with the spams that make it past the blacklist, >or spams coming from the few servers out there which are legitimate >mail senders but are also blacklisted since they send spams as >well - and so you have to put them in an exception list and allow them >to send their mixed ham and spam to you. And its useful to me, causing about 1.5K of these mails to be sent to /dev/null a week. AFAIK I have no bandwidth cap, so if vz wants to waste their bandwidth handling such crap, it no longer bothers me to /dev/null 750 or more bigger penis adds a week along with another 500 phishing scams, and of course maybe 250 419's. >But whenever practical you want to not even receive those spams in >the first place. Why devote CPU time to scanning them when you already >know the sending IP is a spam source? As a pop3 puller only, I have no control over what is placed in my mailbox at vz. >> I would submit that the innate fear of a text editor to be used to >> configure this stuff is a much larger reason a lot of people use a >> webmailer at their ISP. > >I would submit that your goofy structuring of your mailstream is >causing you to receive thousands of spams which your SA install is >then deleting, generating reports of how effective it is, and making >you feel like your winning the war against the spammers. ;-) Nope, its already, except for the address alias the compromised vz server is sending to, already been through the filtration of the ISP, this is what gets by them. >> The question then is how do we convince them its ok to set options in a >> text file instead of a web page controlled by the ISP, where you have to >> click past 3 web spams per message before you can actually see the >> message? > >The question is how do we educate all would-be SA users in best >anti-spam practices, and how to get the most mileage out of SA? I think we do, as its a target that can visibly move in 1 hours time based on what we say right here on this list. Remember that whoever invents the better mousetrap is in the long run, responsible for making a better mouse. >Ted > Thanks Ted, hopefully my explanations will clarify my reasons. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. -- Lazarus Long
