From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/44074 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Lloyd Zusman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Spam spam spam spam spam Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 11:56:05 -0500 Organization: FreeBSD/Linux Hippopotamus Preserve Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1017507432 12779 127.0.0.1 (30 Mar 2002 16:57:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 16:57:12 +0000 (UTC) Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 16rMAB-0003K0-00 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 17:57:12 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 16rM9c-0005By-00; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 10:56:36 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Sat, 30 Mar 2002 10:56:45 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (qmailr@sclp3.sclp.com [209.196.61.66]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA19588 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 10:56:33 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 1168 invoked by alias); 30 Mar 2002 16:56:20 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 1163 invoked from network); 30 Mar 2002 16:56:20 -0000 Original-Received: from home.acholado.net (216.27.138.216) by gnus.org with SMTP; 30 Mar 2002 16:56:20 -0000 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) (uid 501) by home.acholado.net with local; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 11:56:05 -0500 Original-To: ding@gnus.org X-Face: "!ga1s|?LNLE3MeeeEYs(%LIl9q[xV9!j4#xf4!**BFW_ihlOb;:Slb>)vy>CJM (Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen's message of "Sat, 30 Mar 2002 17:32:05 +0100") Original-Lines: 52 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090006 (Oort Gnus v0.06) XEmacs/21.4 (Common Lisp, i686-pc-linux) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:44074 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:44074 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes: > [ ... ] > > My objection to TDMA is basically this -- it requires that the sender > deals with the problem. If somebody sends me a mail, I don't want > them to have to respond to some automatic message before being allowed > to actually communicate with me. It seems unneighborly. And spam > hasn't annoyed me to that point. Yet. I sympathize with you ... I have felt the same way for quite a while. However, the spam problem is getting ever worse, and so now, I've sadly changed my mind ... and TMDA looks pretty good to me. Given the nature of the email conventions on the net (which were never originally intended to provide security against unsolicited mass-mailings), I believe that there is NO algorithm that exists that can examine headers and content and do an even barely passable job of filtering spam. One of the philosophies behind TMDA (blacklist by default, whitelist only as a result of some sort of authentication) seems to be a good basis for some usable spam protection. Yes, it requires senders to authenticate themselves, but as time goes on, I think that people can get used to that as the normal convention with email. And it's rather painless in TMDA: a single reply to a single authentication message does the trick for any given sender. And you can pre-whitelist a group of already-trusted senders. When I started using TMDA, I ran it in a sort of log-only mode for a while, causing it to deliver all email as if TMDA wasn't there, but also to log its idea of the message sender. After examining the logs that accumulated, I was able to come up with a set of senders that I could pre-whitelist. This set consisted of 90+ percent of the people who should be on my whitelist. I then set up the initial whitelist, and re-configured TMDA to start working the way it's supposed to. So far, I haven't heard any complaints from the validly-whitelistable people I had missed, and I actually have gotten some authentication messages back from people, who haven't complained in the least. I'm not saying that TMDA itself is the "be all and the end all" ... it still could use some tweaking, and perhaps there is other software that uses the same philosophy, and which might be more desirable to use. But I really believe that this philosophy (blacklist all but authenticated senders) is the way to go these days, if you want to have any measure of success in blocking spam. -- Lloyd Zusman ljz@asfast.com