Christian Brel wrote:
Last week the blackhats that make up the '$pamAssassin PMC' sought to
silence people who object to paid whitelists appearing in the core
program which seek to give advantage to certain ESP's. vocal in the odd
behaviour of the program. Namely those listed in whitelist 'Habeas' (a
river flowing back to Return Path) are given a negative score to grease
the wheels for the delivery of their UCE.
Now that the dust has settled the Barracuda Marketing Machine (who
appear to have some financial connection with Apache - {citation:
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/company/open-source.php} and
probably have people sitting on the PMC) takes the chance to rear it's
ugly arse and begin redo the spin out it's own pay to spam whitelist
"emailreg.org". emailreg.org may form part of a discussion in a spam
list, but it is off topic for the Spamassassin list.
Whilst Bob O Brian @ Barracuda trying to distance Barracuda from a
direct connection may fool some, sensible people involved in anti-spam
know full well this is a Barracuda product thinly garnished as
something else. Sensible people also know that the Barracuda owner
Micheal Perone is claimed to be a known former spammer: (citation:
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/objections/mperone.shtml)
Barracuda Spam 'and virus' Firewall hardware (a cobbled together mix of
free open source software and largely free rules/virus definitions) by
default passes emailreg.org registered mail. There is *no* facility for
the owner of the Barracuda to disable this without calling Barracuda
Support. Contrast this to the Barracuda Whitelist, which has a check
box to turn it on/off. It is fair to suggest this obmission is because
Barracuda *don't want* users turning off emailreg.org.
The Barracuda White List from Decemeber 2009 is posted elsewhere if you
are interested in a 'who's who':
http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/browse_thread/thread/a9f757e7a2ee38d5#
http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/browse_thread/thread/2745f741838c23ea#
http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/browse_thread/thread/ce79b2349a83a2d5#
The Barracuda machine is now trying to suggest that emailreg.org is of
the calibre of Habeas. It is not. It is a pay to spam service and
deserves no place in the Spamassassin ruleset OTHER than to INCREASE
the score of mail.
Whilst some halfbread moron has suggested giving emailreg.org a -100
score (compared to -4 for Habeas) the better rule is posted below.
PEOPLE READING THIS LIST BE VERY AWARE DARK FORCES ARE AT WORK HERE TO
DISCREDIT AND STRIKE VIEWS THAT EFFECT REVENUE. SPAMASSASSIN IS AS MUCH
ABOUT MAKING MONEY AS IT IS ABOUT BLOCKING SPAM - KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN
TO THE DARK FORCES THAT USE SPAMASSASSIN TO FACILITATE THE DELIVERY OF
PAID FOR, JUNK COMMERCIAL MAIL. DON'T BE BLIND TO THE POWER WEILDED BY
RETURN PATH, BARRACUDA AND OTHERS IN WINING AND DINING Daryl C. W.
O'Shea.
Well, I started the emailreg thread and I'm technically a competitor of
Barracuda's so I'm not part of the "machine". I would also point out
that SA allows you to assign scores however you want. So if you want to
pass spam and block ham SA can do that. Personally I'm interested in
blocking spam and keeping my customers happy.
Although I can appreciate the "slippery slope" argument the way I see it
if if anyone starts selling white listed to spammers then that would
taint their list and no one would use their white list anymore. We (and
I really mean me) use only that which actually works. So if people sold
out to spammers then their list would stop working and would come out of
my rule set.
As to your published list of some Barracuda data, that a rather small
list. Looks like something that would pass my white list too. So I don't
see your point in publishing it in that it doesn't make your point.
I think everyone knows that emailreg is linked to Barracuda. In my
opinion that's a good thing because that have a vast network of spam
filtering servers and can instantly detect if a spammer has bought into
their emailreg and instantly remove them and keep the $20 of the bad
guys money.
But - regardless of the politics and religion, I started the thread to
discuss technical issues and looking for some technical response.
And - in closing - SA focuses too much on detecting spam and not enough
on detecting ham. One of the ways I got my false positives down to
almost nothing is by actively detecting ham. And in many cases this is
easier because those sending nothing but ham are not trying to be
evasive and are fairly easy to discover.
