Rick Cooper wrote:
I am probably over sensitive to blacklists of this nature because of past
problems. I had an issue where someone could not deliver a reply to a
customer once and when I investigated I found the (actually two) server was
on a blacklist I had never heard of. I let our ISP know that apparently
their entire address space was on the list and the owner (someone I have
known since the early eighties) investigated and found the entire att
address space (their carrier) was on this black list and att knew all about
it. Apparently this person wanted them to pay him $50,000 to be removed in
less than one year. Granted few people probably use the list but it still
worries me when some one uses a list maintained by "a guy" and even more so
if it's fully automated.
Personally a relatively few mails on our servers make it to RBL portion (I
also use exim) and get dumped for other reasons, right now the biggest is
probably non FQDN (or bracketed dotted quad) helo. I would say number two is
attempting to send mail heloing as part of our domain space when the host is
not part of our network, and three is attempting to send mail to our
addresses from a host not allowed to send mail from our addresses. I also
seem to see a lot of localhost/localhost.localdomain and 127.0.0.1. I would
like to see a lot more hardfail SPF hits and less SPF none.
I still believe there are too many people who (subconsciously or otherwise)
get a thrill out of "fighting spam" and the world would be much better off
to move to taking responsibility for the mails they send. DKIM is about the
closest thing to what I would like. You can have all the anti-spam laws in
the world but proving responsibility is always the biggest problem. I would
like to see a light weight service similar to DNS used to validate emails,
quick and simple. It could be distributed like DNS and do you approve this
mail, yes or no, like sender verification only without the smtp overhead.
Last one that touches it is responsible, through the chain. The current,
base, smtp spec simply wasn't developed in a time where anyone considered
today's enviroment.
There has to be a better way than trying to catch spam as that does nothing
toward trying to stop it.
Rick
Rick - I totally understand where you are coming from. I've had similar
problems with people blacklisting my servers. But what I'm trying to do
here is develop new tricks for fighting spam. I've found my most
accurate methods of detecting spam is based on differences in the
behaviour of spammers as compared to normal email. When I see something
that's a clear difference I try to find a way to use it. That's what I'm
doing here.
