Pointless SPAM containing story snippet - Why?

[Kevin Miller]

Glenn Steen wrote:
> 
> In the somewhat backward world of financial information, gifs are if
> not common, at least an everyday occurence. Usually in that
> all-too-spamlike maillist that the users just *have* to have... Sigh.
> Not to mention the occasional IFrame, Script tag or Object
> Codebase..... They do their damnedest to make my
> life...interesting:-).
> Could give some example stats if you're really interested:-)

Thanks Glen, but just knowing I'd probably be shooting myself in the
foot (or at least some of my users in the feet <g>) is probably
sufficient not to get too aggressive for the time being.

Things are getting better since last week.  I should have done it a year
ago, but I finally got a milter in place that does both sender and
recipient lookups.  Man, what a difference!  On my terciary MX, which
gets almost no valid emails, I went from around 850 messages processed
around 6:45 am to just a couple hundred.  On my secondary, I went from
around 150-250 to 20.  Dropping them at the MTA level has really cleaned
out a lot of the chaff from the wheat.  I only had one place call w/a
problem - they were sending from a valid address, but it was foreign to
the host they were sending from so the sender verification failed.  I
had to whitelist it as it was some important stuff for our police dept. 

Last year I did the greet pause thing in sendmail with similar results -
after applying it, I saw about 1/10th the traffic coming in.  These two
simple things probably reduced the spam load more than anything else.
Of course, what's left is the craftier spam and that's where the beauty
of MailScanner comes in.  Without it, it would be much harder to
integrate all the various pieces of the puzzle!

Have a great weekend all...

...Kevin
-- 
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500