Re: Spam, bogofilter, etc

From: Horst H. von Brand
Date: Mon Oct 02 2006 - 17:34:19 EST


Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

> If you want a yes/no kind of thing, do it on real hard issues, like not
> accepting email from machines that aren't registered MX gateways. Sure,
> that will mean that people who just set up their local sendmail thing and
> connect directly to port 25 will just not be able to email, but let's face
> it, that's why we have ISP's and DNS in the first place.

Larger sites have ingoing (MX) machines and outgoing (no MX) ones... this
is useless. And the whole SPF fiasco shows that such mechanisms (DNS based,
remote site publishes the data) are even easier to bypass (I've seen
statistics showing that the overwhelming mayority of SPF-"protected" email
is spam).

What does work rather well is greylisting (on first try tell them to come
back later, spammers rarely retry their junk).

Add blacklists (sadly, there are few reliable ones, AFAICS) and you cut it
down even more.

And yes, there is no silver bullet. This is an arms race, get a new
anti-spam device (filter configuration, ...) and soon they will figure out
how to bypass it.

In any case, I've seen claims that around 80% of email now is spam. That
it is still only a little in LKML says that the listmasters are doing an
oustanding job.
--
Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 2797513
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