On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, alan wrote:
For example, I will personally never see email that comes directly to my
email address though an open mail relay *or* from something that appears
to be just a random botnet PC (I forget the exact rule, since I'm hapily
ignorant of MIS, but I think it boils down to requiring a good reverse DNS
lookup).
Depending on your definition of "good".
Well, the most common case (and the thing I *think* our spam software does
here) is to just confirm that the reverse DNS lookup (that you want to do
*anyway* for the "Received" headers for the email) will resolve back to
the same IP (aka "FCrDNS").
It's also possible to just not accept mail if the reverse lookup indicates
that the sending IP address is a dynamic address, which you can sometimes
see from the hostname. I would suggest you *not* name your hosts to
contain a lot of numbers and the string "dhcp", for example ;)
I actually have a fixed IP address.
Sometimes I think the anti-spam methods are as obnoxious as the
spammers. Almost.)
I'll take strict anti-spam methods any day. I get about 10 pieces of spam
a day, that I can handle easily without worrying about it. I shudder to
even just think about what it used to be like before aggressive spam
filtering.
Greylisting dropped my spam level by at least 90%. RBLs have, for the
most part, had far too many false positives to be useful. (If it was just
me, it would not be so bad, but my wife gets mail on this server as well.
She is not so forgiving.)
So I'm personally *solidly* in the camp that says "if you want to send me
email, it's worth making a conscious effort to not look like spam".
I try pretty hard. However, some anti-spam methods share some of the same
methods with dowsing and other witchcraft. What "looks like spam" seems
pretty subjective at times.
I do have a reason for being a bit negative about it. I once ran a very
large development list back in the last century. A piece of spam got past
my spam filters and onto the list. Some idiot got offended and reported
me as a spammer (because my ip was the first thing he saw) and reported me
to my isp and to my isp's upstream feed. Took me a couple days to get
everyone calmed down. Excessive anti-spammers still get on my nerves
after that incident.
--
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
- University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
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