[Slightly OT] New Spam Fighting Technique

[John Rudd]

On May 7, 2004, at 1:32 PM, Schmitt, Andy C - CIDD-2 wrote:

> Interesting.  I like it; it's too bad it can't be integrated into
> MailScanner,

No, but it could help reduce the load of mailscanner if you're on a
heavy traffic mail server.

> It seems like your script is more severe than the DuBois method; you
> take a whitelist and stop everything else for n seconds, while his
> appears to use a blacklist of "home broadband"-style names and lets
> everything else through. Is there a reason for that?

I didn't want to keep track of (nor integrate with someone else's) huge
list of targeted hosts.  And, really, the only thing I don't want to
delay are _my_ desktop client machines (like eudora, etc.), because in
that case the delay effects the response time between "hitting send"
and the window disappearing ... and that's a usability issue.
Everything else, friendly or not, is ok to put through the delay,
because if they're standard conformant they'll be ok (and no direct
user experience is being effected), and if they're not standard then
there's probably a reason I don't want their email (virus, spam, things
like that).


(at home, those desktop clients are both Apple mail, but at work it's a
huge and varied list ... but either way, they're on a consistent
network)

Modifying the script to be more blacklist-ish instead of whitelist-ish
shouldn't be too hard.

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