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Matt Kettler writes: > List Mail User wrote: > > tuxorama.com does a SMTP probe for every posting to this list > > and is one of the very few IPs I have firewalled off. The probes seem > > to always come from 81.169.185.26 (now they'll probably change IPs and I'll > > have to block some other IP or range), so they, while irritating are very > > easy to block. Asking them to stop seems to result in them stopping for > > a week or so, then beginning again. They likely have one or more users > > who subscribe to this list. > > It's almost certainly someone who uses milter-sender. milter-sender does this > dummy check before accepting mail. It's taking the "verify MX record of > envelope > sender" one step further and verifying the whole address. > > I personally find them rather inoffensive, but then again, I don't find many > things offensive that some of the right-wing admins go ballistic over. Hey Matt -- fwiw, I find them pretty inoffensive in and of themselves; however, from a game-theory point of view, their effects are lousy. This, and other methods that attempt to fight spam by validating an email address' validity, don't necessarily try to validate that the email was *sent* by that address; just that the address exists. As a result, it forces spammers to use valid From: and MAIL FROM addresses in their spam. The easiest source for those, for a spammer, is the address list they're sending spam *to*. As a result, the spam recipients now get not just the spam itself, but also the "blowback" -- bounces, C/R bounces, "you sent me a spam!" bounces etc. - --j. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Exmh CVS iD8DBQFDqdVQMJF5cimLx9ARAk8+AJ9j7iFyzCwG8RD+u+1RiIVmWwDYwACbBAvn VsH9aGWa7lPryzN+D7Glvu8= =aywR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
