On Wed, Feb 17, 1999 at 02:27:29PM -0500, Brett Lorenzen wrote:
> I went to Internic to drop them a nasty note (again) about their refusal
> to keep the spiders out of their system, and lo and behold, I get an
> advertisement on the way there FROM Network Solutions saying "getting
> too much spam? get your own dot com address!" Idiots.
Too late. Due to the Internic's incompetence, their entire database
has been snarfed multiple times. In fact, spamhauses are selling it
on CDROM.
> Isn't there some way to write some code for sendmail that does an
> address verification before accepting the message?
Yes, and no. The problem is that many addresses are no longer verifiable
because the MTAs for them live behind firewalls and there's no way
to interrogate them. But sendmail 8.9.3 (and friends) comes with all
the hooks to use the RBL and other blacklists, which will cause much
of the spam to be dropped.
> I'm willing to bet
> 90% of the people I *want* to get email from have finger-able accounts.
I wouldn't make that bet. Finger is pretty much dead, unfortunately,
because it was vastly abused by spammers looking for valid email addresses.
> What about a [...]
These are all good ideas, and all of them have been discussed by
the anti-spam community. You probably want to get on spam-l
(via [EMAIL PROTECTED]) and spamtools (via [EMAIL PROTECTED])
where you will find that multiple approaches to the problem are being
taken, including:
- blocking mail that's sent directly from dialup blocks where
IP addresses are allocated dynamically
- blocking mail from known spam sources
- getting upstream providers to drop connectivity to spammers
- filtering based on certain key strings in message headers
None of these solve the problem entirely; but together they make
a pretty good start.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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